Treating the placenta to prevent adverse effects of gestational hypoxia on fetal brain development

Phillips, Tom J., Scott, Hannah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2497-549X, Menassa, David A., Bignell, Ashleigh L., Sood, Aman, Morton, Jude S., Akagi, Takami, Azuma, Koki, Rogers, Mark F., Gilmore, Catherine E., Inman, Gareth J., Grant, Simon, Chung, Yealin, Aljunaidy, Mais M., Cooke, Christy-Lynn, Steinkraus, Bruno R., Pocklington, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2137-0452, Logan, Angela, Collett, Gavin P., Kemp, Helena, Holmans, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0870-9412, Murphy, Michael P., Fulga, Tudor A., Coney, Andrew M., Akashi, Mitsuru, Davidge, Sandra T. and Case, C. Patrick 2017. Treating the placenta to prevent adverse effects of gestational hypoxia on fetal brain development. Scientific Reports 7 , -. 10.1038/s41598-017-06300-1

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Abstract

Some neuropsychiatric disease, including schizophrenia, may originate during prenatal development, following periods of gestational hypoxia and placental oxidative stress. Here we investigated if gestational hypoxia promotes damaging secretions from the placenta that affect fetal development and whether a mitochondria-targeted antioxidant MitoQ might prevent this. Gestational hypoxia caused low birth-weight and changes in young adult offspring brain, mimicking those in human neuropsychiatric disease. Exposure of cultured neurons to fetal plasma or to secretions from the placenta or from model trophoblast barriers that had been exposed to altered oxygenation caused similar morphological changes. The secretions and plasma contained altered microRNAs whose targets were linked with changes in gene expression in the fetal brain and with human schizophrenia loci. Molecular and morphological changes in vivo and in vitro were prevented by a single dose of MitoQ bound to nanoparticles, which were shown to localise and prevent oxidative stress in the placenta but not in the fetus. We suggest the possibility of developing preventative treatments that target the placenta and not the fetus to reduce risk of psychiatric disease in later life.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Medicine Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA) MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG)
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Publisher:	Nature Publishing Group
ISSN:	2045-2322
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 September 2017
Date of Acceptance:	9 June 2017
Last Modified:	06 May 2023 04:02
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/104557

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