Intrauterine exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection and early newborn brain development

Abstract

Abstract Epidemiologic studies suggest that prenatal exposures to certain viruses may influence early neurodevelopment, predisposing offspring to neuropsychiatric conditions later in life. The long-term effects of maternal COVID-19 infection in pregnancy on early brain development, however, remain largely unknown. We prospectively enrolled infants in an observational cohort study for a single-site study in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area from June 2020 to November 2021 and compared these infants to pre-pandemic controls (studied March 2014–February 2020). The primary outcomes are measures of cortical morphometry (tissue-specific volumes), along with global and regional measures of local gyrification index, and sulcal depth. We studied 210 infants (55 infants of COVID-19 unexposed mothers, 47 infants of COVID-19-positive mothers, and 108 pre-pandemic healthy controls). We found increased cortical gray matter volume (182.45 ± 4.81 vs. 167.29 ± 2.92) and accelerated sulcal depth of the frontal lobe (5.01 ± 0.19 vs. 4.40 ± 0.13) in infants of COVID-19-positive mothers compared to controls. We found additional differences in infants of COVID-19 unexposed mothers, suggesting both maternal viral exposures, as well as non-viral stressors associated with the pandemic, may influence early development and warrant ongoing follow-up.