At the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s (CNS) annual meeting, researchers from the University of Minnesota presented their work on early interventions to ameliorate negative effects on infant brain health.
Their two interventions consist of using engineered gut microbes for antibiotic-exposed infants and the other is a choline supplement to treat infants exposed to alcohol in the womb.
Dr Gale’s new research shows that infants with different compositions of gut bacteria process auditory and visual stimuli differently during memory tasks. “These results raise the possibility that gut bacteria are involved in the development of brain function,” she said.
The study compared the brain activity of infants who received antibiotics within their first month of life to those who did not. Using EEG, the researchers recorded a type of electrical activity called event related potentials (ERPs) in the infants’ brains in response to either their mother’s voice or a stranger’s voice – a “recognition memory” that can be assessed in preverbal infants before any behavioral changes are apparent. This has been shown to be an effective assessment of many aspects of cognitive development.
“Recognition memory is one of the earliest types of explicit memory to develop and is known to be dependent on medial temporal lobe structures, including the hippocampus, the brain region affected by microbiome perturbation in animal models,” explained Dr Cheryl Gale, of the University of Minnesota.
The ERP measurements of infants exposed to antibiotics showed an abnormal response to their mother’s voices compared to those unexposed.
While antibiotics were associated with impact on brain function, a causal relationship could not be established. “We don’t yet know if there is a definitive cause and effect relationship between microbes and brain function in human infants, but future research will hopefully be able to shed light on this,” Gale says.
The work raises the prospect of creating engineered microbes as an early life intervention. “Infancy is a critical time window for brain development, when therapeutic interventions can have effects for the life-course,” Gale said.
The other study was on foetal alcohol exposure, which is still a widespread problem, involved in some 8 in 1000 births worldwide, resulting in serious cognitive consequences. Dr Jeff Wozniak became aware of a lack of neural imaging studies in this very high-need population.
“So I became interested in using some of the tools that we had available here at the University of Minnesota to do high-quality imaging of brain structure and function in this understudied population to learn something about how the brain is altered by prenatal alcohol exposure at the earliest stages of development,” he said.
Together with colleagues, they identified a number of pathways by which alcohol impacts the foetus, such as interfering with the myelination of nerves. The researchers came up with a treatment: choline, an essential nutrient. This has been used in a number of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials in 2-5 year olds with foetal alcohol exposure.
Children receiving choline early in life showed higher non-verbal intelligence, higher visual-spatial skill, higher working memory ability, better verbal memory, and fewer behavioral symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than those in the placebo group.
“The further back you go and do your intervention, the more leverage you have to alter the developmental trajectory of that particular child,” Dr Wozniak said. “So that was the exciting thing about bringing those children back and looking at their development and seeing much larger choline versus placebo effects in cognitive functions like working memory and even behavioural differences in terms of ADHD.”
Source: News-Medical.Net
