Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Population Health, and Neuroscience Institute, New York University Langone Health, New York, New York.
Biol Psychiatry. 2020 Jul 1;88(1):40-50. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.02.007. Epub 2020 Feb 19.
Magnetic resonance imaging, histological, and gene analysis approaches in living and nonliving human fetuses and in prematurely born neonates have provided insight into the staged processes of prenatal brain development. Increased understanding of micro- and macroscale brain network development before birth has spurred interest in understanding the relevance of prenatal brain development to common neurological diseases. Questions abound as to the sensitivity of the intrauterine brain to environmental programming, to windows of plasticity, and to the prenatal origin of disorders of childhood that involve disruptions in large-scale network connectivity. Much of the available literature on human prenatal neural development comes from cross-sectional or case studies that are not able to resolve the longitudinal consequences of individual variation in brain development before birth. This review will 1) detail specific methodologies for studying the human prenatal brain, 2) summarize large-scale human prenatal neural network development, integrating findings from across a variety of experimental approaches, 3) explore the plasticity of the early developing brain as well as potential sex differences in prenatal susceptibility, and 4) evaluate opportunities to link specific prenatal brain developmental processes to the forms of aberrant neural connectivity that underlie common neurological disorders of childhood.
磁共振成像、组织学和基因分析方法在活体和非活体胎儿以及早产儿中的应用，为产前大脑发育的阶段性过程提供了深入了解。对出生前大脑微观和宏观网络发育的理解加深，促使人们关注产前大脑发育与常见神经疾病的相关性。人们对子宫内大脑对环境编程的敏感性、可塑性窗口以及涉及大规模网络连接中断的儿童期疾病的产前起源提出了诸多疑问。关于人类产前神经发育的大部分现有文献来自于横断面或病例研究，这些研究无法解决出生前个体大脑发育差异的纵向后果。本综述将 1）详细介绍研究人类产前大脑的特定方法，2）总结大规模的人类产前神经网络发育，整合来自各种实验方法的发现，3）探讨早期发育大脑的可塑性以及产前易感性的潜在性别差异，4）评估将特定的产前大脑发育过程与儿童常见神经发育障碍的异常神经连接形式联系起来的机会。
