I was recently able to attend Dr. Sodhi’s talk focused on psychiatric illnesses. She dove into illnesses like Autism Spectrum Disorder, bipolar disorders, and others, with a particular emphasis on schizophrenia. She identified glutamatergic dysfunction as a hallmark when it comes to psychiatric illness, decreased activity being identified in people with schizophrenia. She also mentioned that reduced RNA editing is another biomarker of schizophrenia. Following this, the talk was centered around a research article looking into if editing RNA can help prevent or treat neurological diseases or cancer. An important factor in the levels of RNA editing is prenatal stress. It is associated with impaired developmental switch in the hippocampus which results in increased transcription of GluN2B and decreased levels of RNA editing. An interesting point I thought that Dr. Sodhi made was about the widespread effects that stressful historical events like The Six Day War and the Dutch Hunger Winter can have. There are things that mothers can do to try to avoid prenatal stress, but some things are out of their control like socioeconomic status or what is happening in the world around them.
Following this, I was curious if there are ways to mitigate the effects of prenatal stress. The article “Everyday Skills Protect the Developing Brain from Prenatal Stress” examines if this is possible. It focuses on the effect that adaptive skills, meaning abilities that help children be independent and interact with others, can have on preventing some of the long term effects of prenatal stress. Its foundation is a study that examined children that were in the womb during Superstorm Sandy, a stressful event outside of the mother’s control. In this longitudinal study, they found that early adaptive skills impacted how prenatal stress later influenced the limbic system in emotional-processing regions. The children who underwent prenatal stress but also showed stronger adaptive skills early on, displayed similar brain activation patterns to those who were not exposed to prenatal stress. Those who were exposed but showed lower early adaptive skills displayed reduced limbic brain activation.
Both Dr. Sodhi’s talk and this article provide important insights into the effects that prenatal stress can have, and possible ways to combat it. They are both crucial in their own ways. RNA editing allows for a more intense attack on the adverse effects of prenatal stress, showing impacts in severe cases like schizophrenia and cancer. On the other hand, encouraging the development of adaptive skills early on is more accessible to people, and following this can have more widespread effects to aid children who experience disadvantages due to prenatal stress but might not be facing a diagnosis. Both works focus on the effects prenatal stress can have on the limbic system, identifying the same foundation as possibly problematic and in need of attention. They also both highlight how prenatal stress can be outside of the mother’s control and far reaching. At the end of the day, these two solutions to the same problem highlight the importance of having multiple ways to combat neurological disorders and disadvantages due to the complexities of our brains and the world we live in. As the world we live in is filled with stress-inducing events, this is a crucial area of research that provides relief to negative effects a child can experience because of factors neither they nor their mother had any control over. It shows that certain experiences do not need to produce permanent disadvantages, but there are interventions that necessitate further research and a dissemination of knowledge to the public.
References:
Broni, Emmanuel, et al. “Molecular Docking and Dynamics Simulation Studies Predict Potential Anti-ADAR2 Inhibitors: Implications for the Treatment of Cancer, Neurological, Immunological and Infectious Diseases. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, vol. 24, no. 7, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Apr. 2023, pp. 6795–95, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms24076795. Accessed 28 April 2026.
News, Neuroscience. “Everyday Skills Protect the Developing Brain from Prenatal Stress - Neuroscience News.”Neuroscience News, 24 Apr. 2026, neurosciencenews.com/adaptive-skills-prenatal-stress-buffer-30593/. Accessed 28 April 2026.
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