Antonio L. Teixeira - Perinatal Inflammation and Adult Psychopathology: From Preclinical Models to Humans

The last few years have seen a revolution in our understanding of how blood and tissue cells interact and of the intracellular mechanisms controlling their activation. This has not only provided multiple targets for potential anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory therapy, but has also revealed the underlying inflammatory pathology of many diseases.

This series provides up-to-date information on the latest developments in the pathology, mechanisms and therapy of inflammatory disease. Areas covered include: vascular responses, skin inflammation, pain, neuroinflammation, arthritis cartilage and bone, airways inflammation and asthma, allergy, cytokines and inflammatory mediators, cell signalling, and recent advances in drug therapy.

Each volume is edited by acknowledged experts providing succinct overviews on specific topics intended to inform and explain. The series is of interest to academic and industrial biomedical researchers, drug development personnel and rheumatologists, allergists, pathologists, dermatologists and other clinicians requiring regular scientific updates.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/4983

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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Psychiatric disorders have been traditionally conceptualized as the result of an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. Drugs that increase the levels of serotonin are used in the treatment of anxiety and mood disorders, while dopaminergic antagonists are the mainstay of the therapeutics for psychotic disorders. Other strategies aim at distinct neurotransmitters as glutamate and GABA. While the available pharmacological agents help many patients suffering from different psychiatric ailments, a significant percentage of subjects does not respond or tolerate them.

The need for alternative models that could act as targets for new drug development alongside the realization that the impact of psychiatric disorders goes beyond the brain and behavior brought the investigation of immune and inflammatory mechanisms to the forefront of biological psychiatry. Findings of immune changes in the periphery and the central nervous system have been described for almost all psychiatric disorders. A new term, immunopsychiatry, was even proposed in addition to the well-known concept of psychoneuroimmunology to describe this field of investigation (Pariante 2019).

In parallel with the hype around immunopsychiatry, perinatal psychiatry emerged as an area of research that investigates the role of perinatal events (e.g., pregnancy complications, pre- and postnatal infections) in the development of neuropsychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and mood disorders, later in life. Among the implicated pathophysiological mechanisms, perinatal-related immune and/or inflammatory processes have been proposed as major players, also being regarded as putative targets for therapeutic intervention. Therefore, the current volume provides a broad overview on the concepts and evidence implicating inflammation as a possible link between perinatal events and adult psychopathology.

The current volume brings 15 chapters that span from the theoretical foundations of the field to both experimental (maternal and neonatal infections, maternal immune activation models) and human studies, also addressing the role of epigenetics, neuroendocrine programming, and placenta physiology.