Acquired Brain Injuries Across the Perinatal Spectrum: Pathophysiology and Emerging Therapies

Emergence of a synergistic scaffold in the brains of human infants

“…a change in the functional network characteristics that needs rapid optimization of the connection strengths in the newly developed cortico-cortical networks. Moreover, this rationale would offer a mechanistic explanation for the finding that environmental enrichment may modulate the trajectories in synergy development: While the initial growth of neuronal connections is supported by the genetic code and endogenous neural activity [15,18,28], the following global organization including synergy in the neuronal networks is guided by neural activity that is sensitive to environmental and other acquired effects [16,34,35,44]. The frontal lead in the emergence of functional synergy maybe somewhat counterintuitive with respect to the general frontal delay in brain maturation [60][61][62][63].…”

“…Intertwined with the genetically programmed schedules of brain development [27,28], there is growing evidence that early activity-dependent brain development can be substantially affected by environmental factors [16,18,[29][30][31][32]. These "acquired effects" range from major medical adversities like preterm birth or perinatal asphyxia [33][34][35][36] to more subtle issues [31,[37][38][39]. Recent preclinical and clinical studies have suggested that various changes in an infants' living environment ("environmental enrichments") may support improved neurodevelopment at many levels of inspection from the cellular level [40] to brain networks [22,41,42], brain structure [43], and many aspects of later neurobehavioural outcomes [26,44].…”