White matter (WM) injury, once known primarily in preterm newborns, is emerging in its non-focal (diffused), non-necrotic form as a critical component of subtle brain injuries in many early-life diseases like prematurity, intrauterine growth restriction, congenital heart defects, and hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. While advances in medical techniques have reduced the number of severe outcomes, the incidence of tardive impairments in complex cognitive functions or psychopathology remains high, with lifelong detrimental effects. The importance of WM in coordinating neuronal assemblies firing and neural groups synchronizing within multiple frequency bands through myelination, even mild alterations in WM structure, may interfere with the cognitive performance that increasing social and learning demands would exploit tardively during children growth. This phenomenon may contribute to explaining longitudinally the high incidence of late-appearing impairments that affect children with a history of perinatal insults.

Furthermore, WM abnormalities have been highlighted in several neuropsychiatric disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia. In this review, we gather and organize evidence on how diffused WM injuries contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders through different perinatal diseases and insults. An insight into a possible common, cross-disease, mechanism, neuroimaging and monitoring, biomarkers, and neuroprotective strategies will also be presented.

白质（WM）损伤曾经主要发生在早产儿，现在以其非局灶性（弥散性），非坏死性形式出现，是许多早期疾病如早产，子宫内生长受限，先天性心脏缺陷和缺氧缺血性脑病。尽管医学技术的进步减少了严重后果的数量，但复杂的认知功能或精神病理学迟发性损伤的发生率仍然很高，具有终身有害的影响。WM在通过髓鞘作用在多个频带内协调神经元集合放电和神经群同步的重要性，甚至WM结构的轻微变化也可能会干扰认知表现，在儿童成长过程中，社交和学习需求的增长会缓慢地发展。

此外，WM异常在自闭症和精神分裂症等几种神经精神疾病中得到了强调。在这篇综述中，我们收集并整理了有关弥散性WM损伤如何通过不同的围产期疾病和侮辱导致神经发育障碍的证据。还将介绍可能的常见疾病，交叉疾病，机制，神经影像和监测，生物标志物以及神经保护策略。