Posts tagged fetus
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Rhymes can inspire reasoning during the third trimester in the womb
Mozart, Beethoven or even Shakespeare — pregnant mothers have been known to expose their babies to many forms of auditory stimulation. But according to researchers at the University of Florida, all a baby really needs is the music of mom’s voice.
Research published in the most recent issue of the journal Infant Behavior and Development shows that babies in utero begin to respond to the rhythm of a nursery rhyme — showing evidence of learning — by 34 weeks of pregnancy and are capable of remembering a set rhyme until just prior to birth. Nursing researcher Charlene Krueger and her team studied pregnant women who recited a rhyme to their babies three times a day for six weeks, beginning at 28 weeks’ gestational age, which is the start of the third trimester of pregnancy.
“The mother’s voice is the predominant source of sensory stimulation in the developing fetus,” said Krueger, an associate professor in the UF College of Nursing. “This research highlights just how sophisticated the third trimester fetus really is and suggests that a mother’s voice is involved in the development of early learning and memory capabilities. This could potentially affect how we approach the care and stimulation of the preterm infant.”
Krueger’s team recruited 32 pregnant women during their 28th week of pregnancy, as determined by fetal ultrasound. The participants were between 18 and 39 years of age, spoke English as a primary language and were pregnant with their first baby. Once recruited, the women were randomly assigned to either an experimental or a control group. The mean age of the women in the group was 25. In addition, 68 percent of the women were white, 28 percent were black and 4 percent were of another race or ethnicity.
From 28 to 34 weeks of pregnancy, all mothers in the study recited a passage or nursery rhyme out loud twice a day and then came in for testing at 28, 32, 33 and 34 weeks’ gestation. To determine whether the fetus could remember the pattern of speech at 34 weeks of age, all mothers were asked to stop speaking the passage. Then the fetuses were tested again at 36 and 38 weeks’ gestational age.
During testing, researchers used a fetal heart monitor, similar to what is used during traditional labor and delivery, to record heart rate and determine any changes. Researchers interpret a small heart rate deceleration in the fetus as an indicator of learning or familiarity with a stimulus.
At testing, the fetuses in the experimental group were played a recording of the same rhyme their mother had been reciting at home but spoken by a female stranger. Those in the control group heard a different rhyme also spoken by a stranger. This was to help determine if the fetus was responding simply to its mother’s voice or to a familiar pattern of speech, which is a more difficult task, Krueger said.
The researchers found that the fetus’ heart rate began to respond to the familiar rhyme recited by a stranger’s voice by 34 weeks of gestational age — once the mother had spoken the rhyme out loud at home for six weeks. They continued to respond with a small cardiac deceleration for as long as four weeks after the mother had stopped saying the rhyme until about 38 weeks. At 38 weeks, there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups in responding to the strangers’ recited rhymes — the experimental group who heard the original rhyme responded with a deeper and more sustained cardiac deceleration, whereas the control group who heard a new rhyme responded with a cardiac acceleration.
Further research is needed to more fully understand how ongoing development affects learning and memory, Krueger said. Her aim is to recognize how this type of research can influence care in preterm infants and their long-term outcomes.
“This study helped us understand more about how early a fetus could learn a passage of speech and whether the passage could be remembered weeks later even without daily exposure to it,” Krueger said. “This could have implications to those preterm infants who are born before 37 weeks of age and the impact an intervention such as their mother’s voice may have on influencing better outcomes in this high-risk population.”
(Source: news.ufl.edu)
Left-handed fetuses could show effects of maternal stress on unborn babies
Fetuses are more likely to show left-handed movements in the womb when their mothers are stressed, according to new research.
Researchers at Durham and Lancaster universities say their findings are an indicator that maternal stress could have a temporary effect on unborn babies, adding that their research highlights the importance of reducing stress during pregnancy.
However, the researchers emphasised that their study was not evidence that maternal stress led to fixed left-handedness in infants after birth. They said that some people might be genetically predisposed to being left-handed and that there are examples where right and left-handedness can switch throughout a person’s life.
Using 4d ultrasound scans, the researchers observed 57 scans of 15 healthy fetuses, recording 342 facial touches.
The fetuses were scanned at four different stages between 24 and 36 weeks of pregnancy. Researchers also asked the mothers of these babies how much stress they had experienced in the four weeks between each of the scans.
The researchers found that the more stress mothers reported, the more frequently fetuses touched their faces with their left hands. They added that a significant number of touches by the fetuses of stressed mothers were done with their left, rather than right hands - therefore fetal touches of their own faces, indicated a left-handed tendency.
As right-handedness is more common in the general population, the researchers had expected to see more of a bias towards right-handed movements in the fetuses as they grew older. The high percentage of left-handed behaviour, observed only when mothers reported being stressed, led them to conclude that maternal stress has an effect on the lateral behaviour of the babies they scanned.
The findings are published in the journal Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition.
Lead author Dr Nadja Reissland, in Durham University’s Department of Psychology, said: “Our research suggests that stressed mothers have fetuses who touch their face relatively more with their left hand.
“This suggests maternal stress could be having on effect on the child’s behaviour in the womb and highlights the importance of reducing maternal stress in pregnancy.
“Such measures may include increased emphasis on stopping stressful work early, the inclusion of relaxation classes in pre-natal care and involvement of the whole family in the pre-natal period.
“While we observed a higher degree of left-handed behaviour in the fetuses of stressed mothers than had been expected, we are not saying that maternal stress leads to a child becoming left-handed after birth, as there could be a number of reasons for this.
“The research does suggest, however, that a fetus can detect when a mother is stressed and that it responds to this stress.”
Professor Brian Francis, of Lancaster University, emphasised that the study also showed that overall preference for left or right hand varied considerably from scan to scan within each fetus, though fetuses showed more left-hand movements when mothers reported that they had experienced stress. He said: “Overall, there was no consistent handedness preference being shown by the fetuses, with most fetuses switching in preference at least once over the four scans.”
The researchers added that while mothers were asked to report their stress levels in the four weeks between scans, in practice some might have reported the stress they were experiencing at the time of being surveyed.
Previous research has shown that maternal stress in pregnancy leads to increased levels of cortisol – a hormone produced in response to stress - in mothers that could lead to an altered preference for left-sided or right-sided behaviour in fetuses.
The current study did not assess the stress levels of fetuses and Dr Reissland said that future research could examine cortisol levels in fetuses to further determine the effect of stress on lateral behaviour.
Dr Reissland added that further research was also needed to look at whether or not maternal prenatal stress had longer-term effects on the development of infants and children after birth.
(Source: dur.ac.uk)
Fetus in womb learns language cues before birth, study finds
Watch your mouth around your unborn child – he or she could be listening in. Babies can pick up language skills while they’re still in the womb, Finnish researchers say.
Fetuses exposed to fake words after week 29 in utero were able to distinguish them after being born, according to new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Prenatal experiences have a remarkable influence on the brain’s auditory discrimination accuracy, which may support, for example, language acquisition during infancy," the authors wrote in their study.
As revealed by the allure of the so-called Mozart Effect – the idea that exposing the fetus to classical music earns kids extra IQ points in spatial reasoning down the line – parents are constantly looking for ways to give their children an intelligence advantage.
That’s even if the research their parenting tactics are based on is too narrow to draw such broad conclusions or remains under question (the Mozart Effect was deemed "crap," for example, by one scientist.)
Nonetheless, scientists have discovered plenty of evidence that what’s heard in utero can make a lasting impression. Fetuses respond differently to native and nonnative vowels, and newborns cry with their native language prosody (a combination of rhythm, stress and intonation). Researchers led by Eino Partanen at the University of Helsinki wanted to see what other language cues a fetus might pick up in the womb.
For the experiment, Finnish mothers were asked to play a CD with a pair of four-minute tracks that held music punctuated by a fake word: tatata. On occasion, they changed up the vowel – tatota – and in other instances they switched the pitch – tatata, when the middle syllable could be 8% higher or lower, or 15% higher or lower. The false word and its variants featured hundreds of times as the tracks played, and the mothers were asked to play the CD five to seven times per week.
Then, after several weeks of exposure to the fake word, the researchers had to determine whether all this in-utero training had somehow stuck.
The researchers were relying on a phenomenon called mismatch response: a flash of neural activity when the brain picks up on something off, something not quite right – such as when the word tatata is suddenly tatota. If that flash goes off, it means that something doesn’t make sense compared to what the brain has already learned.
The scientists figured that if the flash went off the first time the infant babies heard the modified words (tatota or tatata) after being born, it would mean that they’d been paying attention while in the womb.
They tested the mismatch response once the babies were born by attaching electrodes and studying their brain activity.
Sure enough, the newborns that had been trained in the womb had a response roughly four times stronger to the pitch change (tatota versus tatata) than untrained newborns. (Both trained and untrained babies picked up the tatata versus tatota vowel distinction.)
The findings could mean it’s possible to give babies a little language leg-up before they ever say a word — particularly the children who may need it most.
"It might be possible to support early auditory development and potentially compensate for difficulties of genetic nature, such as language impairment or dyslexia," the authors wrote.
But, the scientists point out, it could mean that babies are also vulnerable to harmful acoustic effects – “abnormal, unstructured, and novel sound stimulation” – an idea that will also require further study. Until then, perhaps it’s best not to hang around any noisy construction sites while pregnant.
Unborn babies ‘practise’ facial expressions in the womb
Unborn babies ‘practise’ facial expressions of pain in the womb, according to a study published today.
The researchers from Durham and Lancaster Universities suggest that fetuses’ ability to show a “pain” facial expression is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors another index of the health of a fetus.
The study is published in the prestigious academic journal, PLOS ONE, and was part funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Durham University.
The study extends the findings of previous work demonstrating that the facial expressions of healthy fetuses develop and become more complex during pregnancy resulting in fetuses being able to show recognisable facial expressions.
The 4D scans of 15 healthy fetuses showed that they develop from making very simple one-dimensional expressions at 24 weeks, such as moving their lips in order to form a “smile”, to complex multi-dimensional expressions which can be recognised as “pain” expressions, by the time the mother is 36 weeks into her pregnancy.
The researchers suggest this is an adaptive process which enables the unborn baby to prepare themselves for life after birth when they have to communicate, for example if they feel hungry or uncomfortable, by making grimaces or crying.
The researchers used the video footage of 4D scans, observing repeatedly the facial expressions of eight female and seven male fetuses from the second to third trimester (24 to 36 weeks) of pregnancy.
Fetuses observed at 24 weeks gestation rarely showed a combination of facial movements which make up a ‘pain face’, such as lowering the eyebrows, wrinkling the nose and stretching the mouth. However, by 36 weeks gestation, a combination of at least four movements was seen rather more frequently, giving the impression that these older fetuses were capable of making a pain face.
Lead researcher Dr Nadja Reissland, of Durham University’s Department of Psychology, said: “It is vital for infants to be able to show pain as soon as they are born so that they can communicate any distress or pain they might feel to their carers and our results show that healthy fetuses ‘learn’ to combine the necessary facial movements before they are born.
“This suggests that we can determine the normal development of facial movements and potentially identify abnormal development too. This could then provide a further medical indication of the health of the unborn baby.
“It is not yet clear whether fetuses can actually feel pain, nor do we know whether facial expressions relate to how they feel. Our research indicates that the expression of fetal facial movements is a developmental process which seems to be related to brain maturation rather than being linked to feelings.”
Professor of Social Statistics at Lancaster University Brian Francis said: “Modern methods of data analysis enable the development of fetal pain faces to be clearly detected, with the complexity of facial movements making up a pain face increasing in the third trimester”.
Despite the advances in medical science, we still do not know very much about health indicators of fetal development or any warning signs of delayed or abnormal progress in the womb.
It is hoped that further research will test whether the development of facial expressions is delayed if fetuses experience unhealthy conditions in the womb, such as effects of smoking or alcohol, or where the fetus is undergoing invasive procedures.
(Source: dur.ac.uk)
Light Exposure During Pregnancy Key to Normal Eye Development
New research in Nature concludes the eye – which depends on light to see – also needs light to develop normally during pregnancy.
Scientists say the unexpected finding offers a new basic understanding of fetal eye development and ocular diseases caused by vascular disorders – in particular one called retinopathy of prematurity that can blind premature infants. The research, led by scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), appears online Jan. 16 ahead of print publication.
“This fundamentally changes our understanding of how the retina develops,” says study co-author Richard Lang, PhD, a researcher in the Division of Pediatric Ophthalmology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “We have identified a light-response pathway that controls the number of retinal neurons. This has downstream effects on developing vasculature in the eye and is important because several major eye diseases are vascular diseases.”
Lang is a principal investigator on the ongoing research along with project collaborator, David Copenhagen, PhD, a scientist in the departments of Ophthalmology and Physiology at UCSF. The scientists say their current study, conducted in mouse models, includes several unexpected findings.
"Several stages of mouse eye development occur after birth," says Copenhagen. "Because of this, we had always assumed that if light played a role in the development of the eye, it would also happen only after birth."
But researchers in the current study found that activation of the newly described light-response pathway must happen during pregnancy to activate the carefully choreographed program that produces a healthy eye. Specifically, they say it is important for a sufficient number of photons to enter the mother’s body by late gestation, or about 16 days into a mouse pregnancy.
Researchers were also surprised to learn that photons of light activate a protein called melanopsin directly in the fetus – not the mother – to help initiate normal development of blood vessels and retinal neurons in the eye.
One purpose of the light-response pathway is to suppress the number of blood vessels that form in the retina. These vessels are critical to retinal neurons, which require large amounts of oxygen to form and to function. When retinopathy of prematurity occurs in infants, retinal vessels grow almost unchecked. This continued expansion puts intense pressure on the developing eye and in extreme cases causes severe damage and blindness.
The research team led by Lang and Copenhagen conducted several experiments in laboratory mouse models that allowed them to identify the light-response pathway’s specific components and function.
Mice were reared in the dark and in a normal day-night cycle beginning at late gestation to observe the comparative effects on vascular development of the eye. The researchers verified the function of the light response pathway by mutating an opsin gene in mice called Opn4 that produces melanopsin, in essence preventing activation of the photo pigment.
Both mice reared under dark conditions from late gestation, and those with mutated Opn4, exhibited nearly identical promiscuous expansion of hyaloid vessels and abnormal retinal vascular growth. The unchecked vascular growth was driven by the protein vascular endothelial growth factor (Vegfa). When the light response pathway is properly engaged, it modulates Vegfa to help prevent promiscuous vascular growth, according to researchers.
The melanopsin protein is present in both mice and humans during pregnancy. Lang said the research team is continuing to study how the light-response pathway might influence the susceptibility of pre-term infants to retinopathy of prematurity and also be related to other diseases of the eye.
Fetal healing: Curing congenital diseases in the womb
Our time in the womb is one of the most vulnerable periods of our existence. Pregnant women are warned to steer clear of certain foods and alcohol, and doctors refrain from medical interventions unless absolutely necessary, to avoid the faintest risk of causing birth defects.
Yet it is this very stage that is now being considered for some of the most daring and radical medical procedures yet devised: stem cell and gene therapies. “It’s really the ultimate preventative therapy,” says Alan Flake, a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. “The idea is to avoid any manifestations of disease.”
The idea may sound alarming, but there is a clear rationale behind it. Use these therapies on an adult, and the body part that you are trying to fix is fully formed. Use them before birth, on the other hand, and you may solve the problem before it even arises. “This will set a new paradigm for treatment of many genetic disorders in future,” says Flake.
Flake has been performing surgery on unborn babies for nearly 30 years, using techniques refined on pregnant animals to ensure they met the challenges of working on tiny bodies and avoided triggering miscarriage. The first operation on a human fetus took place in 1981 to fix a blocked urethra, the tube that carries urine out of the bladder. Since then the field has grown to encompass many types of surgery, such as correction of spinal cord defects to prevent spina bifida.
While fetal surgery may now be mainstream, performing stem cell therapy or gene therapy in the womb would arguably be an order of magnitude more challenging. Yet these techniques seem to represent the future of medicine, offering the chance to vanquish otherwise incurable illnesses by re-engineering the body at the cellular level. Several groups around the world are currently testing them out on animals in the womb.
Of the two, stem cell therapy has the longer history: we have been carrying it out on adults since the 1950s, in the form of bone marrow transplants. Bone marrow contains stem cells that give rise to all the different blood cells, from those that make up the immune system to the oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Bone marrow transplants are mainly carried out to treat cancers of immune cells, such as leukaemia, or the various genetic disorders of red blood cells that give rise to anaemia.
One of Flake’s interests is sickle-cell anaemia, in which red blood cells are distorted into a sickle shape by a mutation in the gene for haemoglobin. People with the condition are usually treated with blood transfusions and drugs to ease the symptoms, but even so they may well die in their 40s or 50s. Some are offered a bone marrow transplant, although perhaps only 1 in 3 can find a donor who is a good match genetically and whose cells are thus unlikely to be rejected by their body. “The biggest issue with treating disease with stem cells is the immune system,” says Flake.
And therein lies the main reason for trying a bone marrow transplant in an unborn baby: its immune system is not fully formed. At around the fourteenth week of pregnancy, the fetus’s immune system learns not to attack its own body by killing off any immune cells that react to the fetus’s own tissues. This raises the prospect of introducing donor stem cells during this learning window and so fooling the immune system into accepting those cells. “You can develop a state of complete tolerance to the donor,” says Flake. “If it works for sickle cell, then there are at least 30 related genetic disorders that could be treated.”
Brain Tissue Damage Experienced By Children With Fetal Alcohol Exposure
Drinking during pregnancy can have a severe, adverse effect on the central nervous systems of children after birth, researchers from Poland have discovered.
The study, which was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), looked at 200 children who were exposed to alcohol during their fetal stage, as well as 30 other kids whose mothers did not drink while pregnant or during lactation.
The researchers used a trio of different MRI techniques in order to study the brain development of both groups of subjects. First, they used standard MRI scans to observe the size and shape of the corpus callosum, which is a group of nerve fibers that oversees communication between the two halves of the brain.
Fetal alcohol exposure is believed to be one of the primary causes of impaired development of the corpus callosum, and sure enough, the MRI scans revealed those who had been exposed to alcohol had “statistically significant thinning of the corpus callosum… compared with the other group,” the RSNA said in a statement.
They also used diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) to study six areas of the central nervous system in both groups. The DWI technique maps the diffusion of water in the brain and can be more successful in detecting tissue abnormalities than regular MRI scans, the researchers explained.
Again, children who had been exposed to alcohol “exhibited statistically significant increases in diffusion on DWI” than their counterparts — an indication there had been damage to the brain tissue, or the presence of neurological disorders, according to Dr Andrzej Urbanik, chair of the Department of Radiology at Jagiellonian University.
Finally, they used proton (hydrogen) magnetic resonance spectroscopy (HMRS) to study the metabolism in the youngsters’ brains. The results uncovered “a high degree of metabolic changes that were specific for particular locations within the brain,” according to Dr. Urbanik.
The RSNA, citing US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics, reports as many as 1.5 out of every 1,000 children born alive suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, and the costs of treating those victims tops $4 billion annually in America alone.
(Source: redorbit.com)
Fetuses yawn in the womb, according to new research
We know that unborn babies hiccup, swallow and stretch in the womb but new observational research concludes that they also yawn.
The 4D scans of 15 healthy fetuses, by Durham and Lancaster Universities, also suggest that yawning is a developmental process which could potentially give doctors another index of a fetus’ health.
While some researchers have suggested that fetuses yawn, others have disagreed and claim it is simple mouth opening.
But the new research clearly distinguished ‘yawning’ from ‘non-yawn mouth opening’ based on the duration of mouth opening. The researchers did this by using the 4D video footage to closely examine all events where a mouth stretch occurred in the fetus.
Using their newly developed criteria, the research team found that over half of the mouth openings observed in the study were classed as yawns.
The study was carried out on eight female and seven male foetuses from 24 to 36 weeks gestation. The researchers found that yawning declined from 28 weeks and that there was no significant difference between boys and girls in yawning frequency.
Although the function and importance of yawning is still unknown, the study findings suggest that yawning could be linked to fetal development, and as such could provide a further medical indication of the health of the unborn baby.
Mom’s High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy Could Affect Child’s IQ in Old Age
New research suggests that a mother’s high blood pressure during pregnancy may have an effect on her child’s thinking skills all the way into old age. The study is published in the October 3, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
“High blood pressure and related conditions such as preeclampsia complicate about 10 percent of all pregnancies and can affect a baby’s environment in the womb,” said study author Katri Räikönen, PhD, with the University of Helsinki in Finland. “Our study suggests that even declines in thinking abilities in old age could have originated during the prenatal period when the majority of the development of brain structure and function occurs.”
Researchers looked at medical records for the mother’s blood pressure in pregnancy for 398 men who were born between 1934 and 1944. The men’s thinking abilities were tested at age 20 and then again at an average age of 69. Tests measured language skills, math reasoning and visual and spatial relationships.
The study found that men whose mothers had high blood pressure while pregnant scored 4.36 points lower on thinking ability tests at age 69 compared to men whose mothers did not have high blood pressure. The group also scored lower at the age of 20 and had a greater decline in their scores over the decades than those whose mothers did not have problems with blood pressure. The finding was strongest for math-related reasoning.
The researchers also looked at whether premature birth affected these findings and found no change. Whether the baby’s father was a manual laborer or an office worker also did not change the results.