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According to an American study, sleep apnea during pregnancy could increase the risk of giving birth to a child with autism.
Sleep apnea during pregnancy could increase the risk of brain and behavioral changes associated with autism, especially in men. This is according to a study carried out on rats conducted by Amanda Vanderplow and her team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the United States. The work was published on February 3 in the journal PLOS Biology.
Sleep apnea results in partially or completely interrupted breathing. This causes a decrease in blood oxygenation and affects 15% of uncomplicated pregnancies and more than 60% of high-risk pregnancies in the third trimester.
In the work, the scientists subjected pregnant rats to intermittent low levels of oxygen during the second half of their gestation period. Result: behavioral abnormalities in offspring were observed shortly after birth, as well as impaired cognitive and social functions in male offspring but not females. Among which, behavioral disorders, memory and socialization. These behaviors, reminiscent of autism spectrum disorders, persisted into adulthood.
Further studies needed
“Our data provide clear evidence that maternal sleep apnea may be an important risk factor for the development of neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly in male offspring” said Michael Cahill, one of the study’s authors.“Here we show that sleep apnea during gestation produces neural and behavioral phenotypes in rodent offspring that closely resemble autism.” Further studies will be needed on humans to establish a definite link between sleep apnea during pregnancy and the risk of autism in the unborn child.
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How maternal hypoxia induced these changes in fetuses that were not experiencing hypoxia themselves remains unclear. Nonetheless, the authors found that in animals, affected offspring exhibited excessive activity of a cell signaling pathway known as the mTOR pathway, a feature identified in the cortex of humans with autism, and that the treatment with rapamycin, an mTOR inhibitor, partially attenuated the behavioral effects of maternal hypoxia in the offspring.