Autism spectrum disorders in extremely preterm infants and placental pathology findings: a matched case–control study

Abstract

BACKGROUND:The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is 5-fold higher in preterm (PT) infants born ≤28 weeks gestational age (GA) as compared to the general population. The relationship between placental pathologic lesions and ASD in PT infants has not been studied. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to determine the association of placental pathology with the occurrence of ASD in PT infants born ≤28 weeks GA. STUDY DESIGN: A matched case-control study to identify confirmed ASD cases (n = 16) and matched controls (n = 48) born at Parkland Hospital between January 2012 and December 2015. Patients were matched using known variables associated with increased risk of ASD in PT infants. Placental histology from all births was reviewed. RESULTS: Children with ASD had 2-fold greater incidence of multiple placental pathologic lesions vs. matched controls [11/16 (69%) vs.16/48 (33%), respectively; P = 0.01]. In contrast, single placental pathologic lesions were not associated with ASD [5/16 (31%) vs. 21/48 (43%), respectively; P = 0.1]. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we have demonstrated an association between the increasing complexity of histologic placental lesions and the later risk for ASD in infants born ≤28 weeks GA. Thus, placental pathology findings may be valuable in further understanding the prenatal pathologic processes underlying ASD in PT infants.

Pathogenic Infections during Pregnancy and the Consequences for Fetal Brain Development

“…Various inflammatory stressors to the fetus in the womb have been shown to affect the susceptibility of male and female fetuses differently [81] (Figure 1). These discrepancies might be explained by gender variations in the placental responses to pathogen-induced UIA, fetal brain anatomy and function, and immune cell characteristics [82][83][84][85][86]. Additional findings suggest that the male brain is comparatively significantly influenced by the innate immune system activation [85].…”

Neurodevelopment and Metabolism in the Maternal-Placental-Fetal Unit

“…All fetal nutrition must pass through the placenta, and alterations in placental function are likewise associated with fetal neurodevelopmental outcomes. 7 , 8 Umbilical cord blood has also been used to investigate fetal metabolism at birth. 9 However, we are not aware of any analysis of the associations among maternal, placental, and fetal metabolism.…”

Prenatal, perinatal and postnatal risk factors associated with autism spectrum disorder in Palestine: a case-control study

“…Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the child's social interaction abilities (Mir, et al 2021). Language and communication difficulties are the main ASD symptoms, besides deficits in interests and activities (Cogley, O'Reilly, Bramham, & Downes, 2020;Win-Shwe, Kyi-Tha-Thu, Fujitani, Tsukahara, & Hirano, 2021).…”

“…Vol. 38(3), 2024 ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ASD development in an increasing number of scientific studies (Cogley, et al 2020;Liu, et al 2021;Mir, et al 2021;Wang, Geng, Liu, & Zhang, 2017). Most of these studies were performed in European and American countries.…”