The functioning of the brain in premature infants can predict future pathologies.

Can the brain state of premature infants influence their subsequent development and provide clues about whether they will suffer certain diseases or disorders in the future?

This question has been posed by an international team that includes researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). They have identified brain activation states that function differently in premature infants and which may influence how they develop later on.

“Brain activation is inherently dynamic. We observe it in our day-to-day lives: our brain is in very different states when we are asleep or awake, happy or sad, calm or angry, and so on; and it rapidly transitions from one state to another in the presence of a stimulus or a threat,” explains Lucilio Cordero, a researcher at UPM’s Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicación (ETSIT) and one of the participants in this work.

Those changes in brain state are also intuitively apparent in infants. Sleep and wakefulness, crying and resting alternate quickly, overlapping with the rapid emergence of new dynamics during the weeks following birth. It is precisely this activity that appears to function differently when babies are born prematurely. But can this influence their later development?

“In adults, various studies have linked the characterisation of dynamic patterns of brain connectivity with language processing, cognition or motor function, as well as with clinical or behavioural traits in different disorders or mental conditions. For this reason, we set out to develop similar analysis techniques for newborns.”

To this end, the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of newborns’ brains with a resolution never before achieved, acquired as part of the Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP). This European Research Council project, in which Cordero also participated, is conducted by UPM’s Biomedical Imaging Technologies group.

Scanning the brains of premature infants

The researchers’ work focuses on differences in dynamic brain connectivity patterns between premature and full-term infants. For this study, premature infants’ brains were scanned close to the time when they would have been born at term, whereas full-term infants were scanned a few days after birth. “This approach enables us to estimate differences in brain development according to whether the baby was outside or inside the maternal womb for some of the third trimester of gestation. Furthermore, at eighteen months of age, the same infants undergo neuropsychological tests to investigate possible relationships between the brain dynamics observed around birth and neurodevelopmental outcomes,” explains the UPM researcher.

Based on these data, the study identified six distinct brain states: three that spanned the entire brain and three restricted to specific regions (occipital, sensorimotor and frontal regions). By comparing full-term and premature infants, the researchers demonstrated that different connectivity patterns are associated with prematurity; for example, premature infants spent more time in frontal and occipital brain states than full-term infants. They also showed that the dynamics of brain state at birth are related to a variety of developmental outcomes in early childhood.

The data would already be noteworthy on their own, the researchers explain, but if one adds the fact that, for the first time, there is an observed association between certain alterations in brain activation patterns around birth and traits related to repetitive behaviour, sensory perception and social interactions measured at eighteen months of age, the relevance of the work increases substantially.

“This is a pioneering study that establishes new procedures for characterising disruptions in the normal functioning of the newborn brain, with potential implications for the early diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders,” says Lucilio Cordero. “In particular, the findings of this study could in future contribute to the early diagnosis of schizophrenia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or autism. Likewise, the ability to analyse brain activation dynamics in detail could contribute to the development of personalised prevention and intervention protocols that improve the life course of infants at higher risk of developing these disorders or mental conditions,” he concludes.

Collaboration and publication

In addition to UPM, institutions participating in this work include King’s College London, Northumbria University, the University of Oxford, the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Imperial College London, the University of Turku, Turku University Hospital, Pompeu Fabra University, the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Monash University and Evelina London Children’s Hospital.

Video of the news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUp52SJaU2s

Source: Press room, Research news: https://short.upm.es/4qhjz, originally published at its source on 17 February 2025.

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