In recent decades, a large body of evidence has linked prenatal exposure to environmental neurotoxins to adverse intellectual, neurodevelopmental, and psychiatric outcomes in offspring. This evidence has clearly highlighted the widespread impact of neurotoxin exposure on the developing brain; however, it is unclear how and why these exposures alter brain development in a way that appears to increase risk for multiple, seemingly disparate outcomes.

Shifting our focus from describing links between neurotoxin exposure and symptoms of offspring mental/cognitive problems considered categorically, to investigating how neurotoxins adversely affect domains of functioning known to cut across risk for multiple problems in offspring may be critical to answering these questions. This presentation will discuss how combining research in developmental neurotoxicology with novel systems that take dimensional approaches to understanding emotions, cognition, and behaviour (i.e., the NIHM Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)) may provide a fruitful future research direction for the field. The RDoC framework aims to understand neuropsychological outcomes (i.e., mental health, mental illness, IQ) across major domains of human emotion, cognition, behaviour, and social functioning, rather than within distinct diagnostic categories.

Using lead exposure as an example, this presentation will outline a framework for how researchers can use this dimensional approach to develop more specific hypotheses that can reveal how and why neurotoxin exposure increases risk for multiple adverse outcomes and elucidate the mechanisms that may underly these links.

Additionally, given that adverse development within domains of functioning can be detected prior to the onset of full-blown diagnoses, this research could enable us to develop more precise, targeted prevention and risk reduction campaigns. Adopting a dimensional framework will provide a more complete picture of the overall impact of prenatal exposure to neurotoxins - critical for informing public health policy.