2016 SADII-SCORE Awardee, Johns Hopkins
Dr. Kristin Voegtline, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, is a developmental psychobiologist studying the organizational effects of the prenatal period on development after birth.
We now have increasing evidence that hormones impact the formation of the embryonic and fetal brain; Dr. Voegtline is looking into the impact of the hormones that cross the placenta and target that brain while the baby is still in the uterus. She believes that testosterone may have a different impact on boy and girl fetuses. Among organizing signals of the intrauterine environment, she is particularly interested in maternal sex steroids which may cross the placenta and target the fetal brain. In prior work, she has shown prenatal maternal testosterone levels are related to altered growth and neural maturation in fetuses and infants, and that effects are most pronounced for males. Dr. Voegtline will now test the hypothesis that prenatal testosterone exposure leaves an epigenetic mark via alterations to DNA methylation, a measure of gene functional capacity, and that testosterone action at the genetic level may be different for males and females.
Awarded: $50,000
What is Dr. Kristin Voegtline studying?
The sex-specific development of the human brain.
Why study this condition?
Maternal hormones cross the placenta during pregnancy and impact neurodevelopment in the fetus. In particular, the concentration of testosterone in the mother’s blood has a more pronounced effect on male compared to female brains in utero.
What did Dr. Voegtline find?
Doctor Voegtline has had several important papers published since her original award.
She studied the impact of severe respiratory disease due to COVID-19 infection during pregnancy and found that the virus produced placental inflammation, which may have made the treatment for COVID less effective. This may have contributed to the observation that pregnant women, who are more susceptible to infection than non-pregnant females, had more severe illness with this virus and had a higher risk of premature delivery.
15% of women have mood disorders in the perinatal period; anxiety in the time around the baby’s birth is estimated to cost almost $40,000 to treat affected women.
Doctor Voegtline has also expanded our ability to use saliva to test pediatric patients for markers of diseases like endocrine dysfunction, traumatic brain injury and cardiometabolic disease.
How did The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine’s grant help Dr. Kristin Voegtline‘s research?
Our grant helped Doctor Voegtline’s studies on the vulnerability of pregnant women, including the increase in anxiety and depression that often-characterized women in the perinatal period.
Current Status
Doctor Voegtline is a member of the Department of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Back to The Foundation for Gender-Specific Grantee Awardees. The Hopkins Early Neurodevelopment Laboratory is a research laboratory within the Department of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Under the leadership of Dr. Kristin Voegtline, they conduct studies to understand how early life experiences impact brain and behavior development in the prenatal, infant and early childhood periods.