UC Davis Conte Center

Melissa Bauman and Claudia Buss (UC Irvine) recently served as guest editors for a special issue of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, which explores converging evidence linking exposure to maternal infection during pregnancy with offspring neurodevelopmental disorders. In this special issue, Bauman and Buss invited contributors to draw from studies in humans and animal models to examine the association between maternal inflammatory processes and offspring neurodevelopment. The overarching goal of the special issue was to highlight collaborative opportunities between clinical and preclinical research approaches to identify underlying neurobiological mechanisms linking maternal inflammation with risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring, ultimately, to develop novel therapeutic interventions and preventative strategies.

"We now think of exposure to infection during pregnancy as a disease primer that, in combination with other genetic and environmental risk factors, may increase the risk of altered neurodevelopment for a subset of exposed pregnancies."
— The MIND Institute's Melissa Bauman

Bauman was interviewed by Spectrum for this article about whether there may be any possible connection between COVID-19 infections during pregnancy and autism.