Brain development
Maternal Obesity Affects Newborn Brain Wiring
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Maternal obesity is linked to altered functional connectivity in the brains of newborn infants across networks regulating behavior, taste, reward, and movement.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Early life stress, premature birth, and maternal metabolic factors can alter functional connectivity in the infant brain, affecting emotional and sensory-motor networks shortly after birth.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Maternal physiological and psychological states during pregnancy, including high body mass index and clinical stress, are associated with altered functional connectivity patterns in neonatal brain networks at birth.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Neonatal rs-fMRI at ~2 weeks; mothers split by early-pregnancy BMI
- N
- N=38 · 23 normal-BMI and 15 high-BMI mothers; 46 women originally enrolled
- Population
- Full-term infants scanned at about two weeks of age
- Outcome
- Neonatal functional connectivity differences associated with maternal early-pregnancy adiposity
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Maternal Obesity Affects Newborn Brain Wiring
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
38 full-term infants
In this study, leveraging resting-state fMRI scans () on 38 full-term neonates with maternal adiposity measures [i.e., body-mass-index (BMI) and body-fat-mass (BFM) percentages], we aimed to systematically examine whole-brain functional connectivity patterns to unveil the full spectrum of impact of maternal adiposity on the offspring’s brain.
2 weeks of age
At ∼2 weeks of age, MRI examination of the brain was conducted in the Department of Radiology at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital.
Key findings
The study revealed significant functional connectivity alterations in infants born to mothers with high body mass index across four functional domains. Specifically, 17 distinct neural pathways showed altered connections, with 14 of these showing stronger, hyper-connected patterns in the high maternal body mass index group. These altered connections were particularly concentrated in brain regions responsible for cognitive control, reward processing, sensory cue processing, and motor control.
Methodology
Researchers performed resting-state functional MRI scans on 38 full-term infants at around 2 weeks of age. The infants were divided based on their mothers' early pregnancy weight: 23 had mothers with normal body mass index, and 15 had mothers with high body mass index. The researchers used a specialized brain atlas to partition the infant brains into 223 distinct regions to evaluate localized and global functional connectivity patterns.
Limitations
This study cannot prove that maternal adiposity directly causes brain differences, as it is a correlational design that cannot rule out other genetic or postnatal factors. Additionally, the small sample size of 38 infants limits the ability to detect more widespread or subtle differences in brain wiring. Lastly, the study lacks long-term behavioral data, so it remains unclear how these early functional brain changes translate to the child's actual cognitive or eating behaviors as they grow.
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