Colloquium: Prenatal maternal distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on infant brain connectivity
- Date
- March 29, 2021
- Time
- 1:30 PM EDT - 3:00 PM EDT
- Location
- Zoom meeting
- Open To
- Students, Faculty, Adjunct Faculty, Staff and Post-Doctoral Fellows
- Contact
- biomed@ryerson.ca
Prenatal maternal distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on infant brain connectivity
Dr. Kathryn Manning
T. Chen Fong postdoctoral fellow
Department of Radiology, University of Calgary
Abstract:
We investigated the effects of prenatal maternal psychological distress in pregnant Canadian mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic on the early development of the infant brain. The Pregnancy during the Pandemic study involves a subset of longitudinal scanning of newborn infants using the 3T MRI at the Alberta Children's hospital including resting state functional and diffusion MRI. We found that amygdala microstructural pathways were significantly related to amygdala-prefrontal functional connectivity at 2-months of age. Diffusion MRI measures were related to maternal anxiety and psychological distress depending on the quality of social support the mother received during the pregnancy.
Bio:
Dr. Kathryn Manning is a T. Chen Fong postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Radiology at the University of Calgary. She completed her BSc in Physics and Applied Mathematics at Memorial University and her MSc and PhD in the Department of Medical Biophysics at Western University. Under the supervision of Dr. Ravi Menon at the Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (Robarts Research Institute), she demonstrated functional neuroplastic mechanisms in young children with cerebral palsy as well as the longitudinal effects of sports-related concussions and impacts in hockey and rugby players using MRI. She is currently studying the development of the young brain using data-driven image analysis approaches. Her work with Dr. Catherine Lebel's Developmental Neuroimaging Lab focuses on relating structural and functional brain measures from a variety of data sets including the Calgary Preschool Study and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to isolate developmental trajectories that underlie and predict healthy development and disease.