Stress and the Baby Brain

Abstract

Increasingly, we are coming to understand that vulnerability to neuropsychiatric morbidities such as schizophrenia, autism, depression, and anxiety disorders are likely encoded in early events of brain development. For the last few decades, we have been successful in identifying what some of these brain-based vulnerabilities look like in adults: altered brain morphology, differences in circuit function and connectivity, and changes in gene expression and function, to name only a few. These insights have been enormously helpful in our quest to better understand how brain function can go awry, but relatively less emphasis has been placed on understanding when in the trajectory of brain development these vulnerabilities are laid down.