UCI Fetal Programming of the Newborn and Infant Brain

Fetal Programming of the Newborn and Infant Human Brain is a prospective study at the University of California, Irvine. Children were followed from a population-based pregnancy cohort in which the mothers' stress hormones, inflammatory markers, obstetric course and psychosocial state had been measured serially during pregnancy. The children were scanned shortly after birth and again around their first birthday to test whether this prenatal milieu predicts hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal size, white matter integrity and early cognitive and motor development. The data are deposited in NIMH Data Archive collection 1890.

Composition

The NDA collection lists 391 subjects with shared data, a figure that includes mothers as well as children. Images (the NDA Image structure) are shared for 118 subjects; the collection describes them as healthy infants aged 0 to 4 weeks with demographics, T1-weighted, T2-weighted and diffusion images, and a resting-state fMRI experiment is attached. Other shared records include maternal cortisol and blood assays, clinical lab tests, maternal IQ, Bayley-III and infant motor scores, and home environment ratings. Study papers report 86 newborns with structural MRI scanned at about 4 weeks of age, 70 of them with resting-state fMRI, and 32 children rescanned at 12 months. Exclusion criteria included birth before 34 weeks of gestation and congenital, genetic or neurologic disorders of the infant.

Acquisition

All scans used a Siemens Tim Trio 3T with a 12-channel head coil while the infant slept naturally after feeding. The protocol had a 1 mm isotropic MPRAGE T1w, a 1 mm T2w turbo spin echo, diffusion imaging with 42 directions at b=1000 s/mm2 plus 7 b=0 volumes at 2 mm, and gradient-echo EPI BOLD with a 2 s repetition time; the NDA experiment record gives a resting run of 6 min 34 s.

Known limitations

• Access requires an approved NDA data access request.
• The NDA record gives no breakdown by sex, age or visit, and does not say how many newborn and 12-month sessions are shared.
• Sex, age and scan counts in the papers describe analysis samples, not the shared collection.