Development Begins Before Birth: Prenatal Research Relevant to Autism

The burgeoning research field known as the fetal origins of adult disease (FOAD) or the developmental origins of health and disease (DOHAD) demonstrates that maternal distress during pregnancy affects fetal and infant brain–behavior development. This is a ‘third pathway’ for the familial inheritance of psychiatric illness beyond shared genes and the quality of parental care, and one that, if fully understood, could lead to early prevention of developmental risk.

In this lecture, Dr. Catherine Monk will describe her lab’s FOAD studies that focus on women in the perinatal period and fetal and infant neurobehavioral development, including direct studies of the fetus, newborn brain imaging and placental methylation.

Applying the FOAD model to autism research introduces the possibility of identifying perinatal markers for the disorder and may help advance the animal and epidemiological findings showing that prenatal maternal immune activation — often a correlate of distress — is associated with risk for the illness.