Parent-Child Brain Connection for Life.Dr Catherine Lebel is an Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Calgary and a Canada Research Chair in Pediatric Imaging. She leads the Child Brain & Mental Health Program at the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute and is a member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute.  Dr. Lebel received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Alberta and completed postdoctoral training in Neurology and Pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research uses MRI to study how brain structure and function change with age in typical children and those with neurodevelopmental disorders, including fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and learning disabilities. She also examines how brain structure and function are related to cognitive, behavioural and environmental factors, including the prenatal environment. This is an important episode showing how prenatal exposure to alcohol changes the fetal brain and its connections to different parts of the brain. Parents/carers are the single most important neuroplasticity opportunity for healthy brain development in their children.Learn all about Parent-Child Connections in the Brain.The amygdala is a small structure that sort of looks like an almond. And it's deep in the brain. And we have one on each side, one in each hemisphere. And it's involved in a lot of different things. But of primary interest here and in a lot of studies is its role in emotion processing, particularly fear and anxiety. So the amygdala has been implicated in a lot of mental health problems and behaviour problems in children. And in this study,  we've looked at the amygdala in children and how it's related to prenatal depression in their mothers.   So prenatal depression, of course, is a stressful experience. And it can change things like stress hormones like cortisol glucocorticoids, and these affect the foetus as well as the mum.  And so that's likely one of the mechanisms via which this maternal stress can impact child's brain development. And so what we saw in this paper is that this stress in mums, prenatally, this anxiety specifically, was related to the way the amygdala was functioning with other parts of the brains in the kids. So we use a technique called functional connectivity, where we look at how different parts of the brain are sort of functioning together, or how their signals over time are correlated, and how they look similar. And so we saw that this anxiety related to this functional connectivity between the amygdala and some other areas of the brain. Their team saw connections were sort of in the post central area of the brain, this is the kind of top and a little bit back part of the brain. And it's involved in a variety of functions really. Among them are things like, like movement. So it's kind of interesting that it showed relationships with the amygdala as well. But one of the important reasons to look at this is because we know these kids are at heightened risk of having anxiety problems themselves later in life. So I think we believe that these brain changes are a potential mechanism. So the moms' anxiety and pregnancy affect the growing brain, which kind of might predispose these kids to anxiety difficulties themselves.Prenatal stress, in the form of either anxiety or depression, is affecting pretty similar parts of the child, an infant's brain, these specifically are emotion areas, the limbic system, we call it, which includes the amygdala, includes parts of the prefrontal cortex, and it includes connections between them.  The role of the partner influences the symptoms in the mum, but alSupport the showSubscribe and support the podcast at https://www.buzzsprout.com/367319/supporters/newLearn more at www.profselenabartlett.com