Though many people with autism spectrum disorders also experience unusual gastrointestinal inflammation, scientists have not established how those conditions might be linked. Now MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers, working with mouse models, may have found the connection: When a mother experiences an infection during pregnancy and her immune system produces elevated levels of the molecule Interleukin-17a (IL-17a), this can not only alter brain development in her fetus, but also alter her microbiome such that after birth the newborn’s immune system can become primed for future inflammatory attacks. In four…
