Once the infant born without any problem neither during pregnancy nor at birth, his/her developing brain is shaped by interactive influences of genes and experience. The brain architecture will form as expected if the parents and caregivers respond attentively to the interaction initiated by their child. Nurturing relationships in the early years promote physical and mental health and benefit for learning throughout the life cycle. Not only is supportive, attentive and sensitive care from adults required for an optimal infant’s brain development, it also protects the developing brain from potentially harmful effects of stressors. Moreover, if an infant’s brain has already been affected by toxic stress, scientific evidence shows that supportive and responsive relationships as early in life as possible can prevent but also reverse the damaging effects of toxic stress.
DEVELOPMENT
Work investigating the impact of experience on brain maturation during development and vice versa is still scarce. Adolescent neurobiology has also been relatively understudied. Therefore, the full complexity of the issue cannot yet be understood. The hypothesis telling that developmental changes in brain structure are prerequisites of a particular cognitive ability could be obsolete as the role of experience in shaping the brain could be stronger than previously thought. The image data add up with genetic information, behavioural scores, family history, blood tests, and much more. This flood of data is more than researchers can currently understand, and new bioinformatics and statistical methodologies are required to better grasp what information is most relevant to patient care.
EARLY LIFE STRESS
Research on early life stress needs more studies to elucidate the effect of childhood stress on brain structures and processes. The field also lacks an adequate understanding of the genetic variations among children that moderate the reactivity, regulation, and impact of stress responses. Future research should analyse the impact of different types of trauma at different developmental stages, in order to identify sources of outcome variability. Furthermore, the use of salivary cortisol measure (a non-invasive measure of the effect of chronic stress) has boosted research on the neuroendocrine system involved in stress response, namely the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis (or stress hormone axis).
ATTENTION
To determine which brain areas are the likely cause of Event Related Potentials measured on the scalp, researchers use Equivalent Current Dipole (ECD) analysis, which provides a more direct measure of infant brain activity involved in attention. However, the parameters used in ECD analyses are based on adult anatomy (e.g., skull and scalp thickness). As the infant skull is thinner than that of adults, and the fontanels and skull sutures are not yet completely fused, there is room for improvement for the testing.
Problems with visual disengagement, often expressed in infants as prolonged visual fixation, together with high levels of distress, are very worrisome and challenging for parents. They should be detected early and seen as flags that warrant referral.
VISION
Visual experience is crucial for a child's vision to develop normally – a “use it or lose it” situation; treatment of common childhood eye diseases should begin much earlier than standard practice dictates.
AUDITION
Brain’s response to a sound event (the auditory event-related potential) could be used in infants as a diagnostic indicator of early abnormal central auditory development; these are a method of choice for examining early auditory development and the maturation of auditory cortex. Passive learning, for example learning from tapes or from speaking toys, is one of the interventions that is suggested to remediate to problems in speech perception and language acquisition.
MEMORY
Learning about memory and brain development in infancy will require more studies conducted in humans because at the moment, a lot of information comes from animal models (rodents and nonhuman primates).
As we increase our understanding of the relations between brain and behaviour, we will be able to develop interventions to help infants and children in the at-risk groups (ex.: infants born to mothers with blood sugar control problems during pregnancy, infants adopted from international orphanages and healthy preterm infants).
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