By Exposure to pregnant women against pollution and air stress can increase the risk of social behavior such as autism and different cable brain in men, according to a study of mice.
Air pollution, such as exhaust emitted by diesel engines in trucks, is related to an increase in the rate of nerve developmental disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism.
While 99% of people worldwide live in cities with unhealthy air, only one in every 44 children diagnosed with autism (and four times more boys than girls). Why don’t everyone develop autism?
“Environmental poison is worse for some people than others, and always the most vulnerable population that is affected,” said Staci Bilbo, professor of psychology and neurological science at Duke University.
In the case of autism and air pollution, Bilbo thinks that the missing relationship is the stress of mothers who come from poverty and insecure housing.
“It’s not a rich person not stressed,” Bilbo said. “But it’s different when you have to worry about where you will stay and whether you are safe in your house.”
Although the team cannot experiment with conditions in pregnant women for ethical reasons, they expose pregnant mice in diesel exhaust particles as proxies for air pollution. Pregnant mice are also given less building materials than usual to build their nests for their puppies.
While their daughter grew up as expected, their sons were wrongly reading social cues throughout their lives. As a teenager, a man born from stress and mothers who are exposed to fog prefer to get along with yellow rubber duck rather than rats nearby (mice usually prefer to be accompanied by one of them themselves than bathing toys).
Furthermore, the team found that stressful mothers who inhaled diesel smoke brings out men who, as toddlers, have many brain cell connections, called synapses, which need to be peeled when we grow up. Synapses that lead to successful tasks, such as taking a glass, maintained and strengthened, while the connection that causes efforts to fail to be removed.
The researchers also found that the immunity cells in the brain called microglia, which eliminated weak or dead synapses, had less protein that stimulated their appetite for synapses, which might explain the overheated growth.
In adulthood, everything is upside down. Men from the haze and stress exposed to the mother now have less synapses and prefer to be friends than their peers who are not exposed.
This atypical tendency becomes more out than reserved reflects the behavior and activity of mouse brain with genes connected to autism.
The team notes that people with autism are often mistakenly considered social; For people with autism, this is more misunderstanding about the signal and social conventions than inherent introverts.