Maternal infection: A new study found only a modest association between having influenza during pregnancy and having a child with a neuropsychiatric condition, such as autism. The analysis used two cohorts with more than 2.7 million mother–child pairs, including more than 47,000 children exposed to maternal infection. A sibling-comparison assessment weakened the link to the point of not being statistically significant, suggesting that familial factors play a larger role than maternal infection. Another recent paper reported that COVID-19 infection during pregnancy does not increase the risk of neurodevelopmental conditions in children. The Transmitter has previously reported on the slight increase in autism likelihood observed with maternal infection.
Autism research spotted this week:
- “Preserved intrinsic neural timescale organization with hierarchical variation in autism spectrum disorder” Cerebral Cortex
- “Hyperfunction of PSD-95 leads to hyperexcitability and cognitive abnormalities in MEF2C haploinsufficiency” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- “Disparities in autism spectrum disorder and perinatal risk factors” JAMA Network Open
- “A massively parallel reporter assay of MECP2 cis-regulatory elements reveals genetic candidates for male-biased autism” American Journal of Human Genetics
- “The genetic orchestra of autism and its intersections with epilepsy, intellectual disability, and ADHD” Biological Psychiatry
- “Systematic evaluation of incomplete penetrance in 4,325 rare disease families reveals divergent transcriptional networks in CHD8 pathology” medRxiv
- “Characterizing autism phenotype onset in the electronic health records to enable age-specific screening” Autism Research
- “Human-specific CCG-repeat insertion in the RBFOX1 promoter implicated in autism and speech enhances EGR1-responsive activity” bioRxiv
See also: “Birdsong-related DNA sequences tied to autism-linked genes”
