Our Research Approach

The developmental disorders with which many children are diagnosed are neurological disorders that originate during pregnancy and have no direct genetic cause. These disorders include certain speech delays and abnormalities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia, Tourette syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and bipolar disorder. According to the Centers for Disease Control, autism affects one in 150 children born is the United States, while bipolar disorder has seen a forty-fold increase in pediatric diagnoses is the past decade. All of these disorders are classified as “neurodevelopmental” and not “genetic” because they do not have a clear genetic cause, where an abnormality on a gene alone is responsible for the disorder, regardless of the prenatal environment.

We started the Fetal Physiology Foundation to explore developmental disorders using a different set of criteria and a new approach to research. Our approach to research into the underlying causes of developmental disorders is one which will explore changes in fetal development that occur after conception due to environmental and genetic influences, rather than those that occur before conception through a genetic abnormality.