Baby's First Breath Triggers Life-Saving Changes in the Brain
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Baby's first breath triggers life-saving changes in the brain:
A team of researchers led by UVA's Yingtang Shi, MD; Patrice Guyenet, PhD; and Douglas A. Bayliss, PhD, have discovered a signaling system within the brainstem that activates almost immediately at birth to support early breathing. That first gasp that every parent cherishes appears to trigger this support system.
[...] Bayliss and his colleagues at UVA, working with researchers at the University of Alberta and Harvard University, found that a specific gene is turned on immediately at birth in a cluster of neurons that regulate breathing selectively in mice. This gene produces a peptide neurotransmitter -- a chain of amino acids that relays information between neurons. This transmitter, called PACAP, starts to be released by these neurons just as the baby emerges into the world.
[...] PACAP is the first signaling molecule shown to be massively and specifically turned on at birth by the breathing network, and it has been linked genetically to SIDS in babies. The causes of SIDS likely are complex, and there may be other important factors to discover, the researchers note.
Journal Reference:
Yingtang Shi, Daniel S. Stornetta, Robert J. Reklow, et al. A brainstem peptide system activated at birth protects postnatal breathing [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2991-4)
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