Dyslexic Mice?

As many of you know all too well, dyslexic children tend be prone to allergies, such as eczema and asthma. These conditions are due to the body producing antibodies which attack your own skin or lungs for some reason. We wondered whether in dyslexics attack by antibodies directed against their own nerve cells might be partly responsible for their brain differences that impede reading.

Since half a baby’s genes are inherited from its father, a mother’s baby is actually ‘foreign’ in the womb to her, and she automatically produces antibodies against it. These do not normally harm the baby because they do not get across the placenta into the baby’s blood stream. But a small proportion may do so and cause damage.

With Professor Angela Vincent at Oxford’s Institute of Molecular Medicine we therefore sought to find out whether mothers with dyslexic children may produce antibodies that can attack nerve cells in the brain. So we injected these mothers’ serum (which contains the antibodies) into the wombs of pregnant mice to see if the antibodies affected the development of the pups’ brains.

Of course mice cannot read; but we can test their coordination autopilot, the cerebellum, which is mildly affected in many dyslexics. When the mice offspring were a few months old we tested their cerebellar coordination and metabolism, and we found that indeed the cerebellum of some of the mice was affected. Thus maternal antibodies may sometimes play a role in the development of neurodevelopmental disorders.

However this is not the only factor and of course it does not mean that it is the mother’s ‘fault’. Probably dyslexics inherit some special vulnerability of their nerve cells to such antibody attack.