Maternal Immune Activation and Neuropsychiatric Illness: A Translational Research Perspective.

Maternal Immune Activation and Neuropsychiatric Illness: A Translational Research Perspective. Am J Psychiatry. 2018 Sep 17;:appiajp201817121311 Authors: Brown AS, Meyer U Abstract Epidemiologic studies, including prospective birth cohort investigations, have implicated maternal immune activation in the etiology of neuropsychiatric disorders. Maternal infectious pathogens and inflammation are plausible risk factors for these outcomes and have been associated with schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and bipolar disorder. Concurrent with epidemiologic research are animal models of prenatal immune activation, which have documented behavioral, neurochemical, neuroanatomic, and neurophysiologic disruptions that mirror phenotypes observed in these neuropsychiatric disorders. Epidemiologic studies of maternal immune activation offer the advantage of directly evaluating human populations but are limited in their ability to uncover pathogenic mechanisms. Animal models, on the other hand, are limited in their generalizability to psychiatric disorders but have made significant strides toward discovering causal relationships and biological pathways between maternal immune activation and neuropsychiatric phenotypes. Incorporating these risk factors in reverse translational animal models of maternal immune activation has yielded a wealth of data supporting the predictive potential of epidemiologic studies. To further enhance the translatabili...
Source: The American Journal of Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Am J Psychiatry Source Type: research