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Abstract
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BACKGROUND: Early life experiences have profound effects on functioning in adulthood. Altered cortical development may be one mechanism through which early life experiences, including poverty and psychopathology symptoms, impact outcomes. However, there is little prospective research beginning early in development that combines clinician rated psychopathology symptoms and multi-wave MRI to examine when these relationships emerge.
METHODS: Children from the Preschool Depression Study who completed diagnostic interviews at three different developmental stages (preschool, school-age, early adolescent) and up to three MRI scans beginning in middle childhood participated in the current study (N=138). Multilevel models were used to calculate intercepts and slopes of cortical thickness within a priori cortical regions of interest (Sotiras et al., PNAS 2017). Linear regressions probed how early life poverty and psychopathology (depression, anxiety, and externalizing symptoms at separate developmental periods) related to intercept/slope.
RESULTS: Collectively experiences during the preschool period predicted reduced cortical thickness, either via reduced intercept or accelerated thinning (slope). Early life poverty predicted intercepts within sensory and sensory-motor integration regions. Beyond poverty, preschool anxiety symptoms predicted intercepts within insula, subgenual cingulate, and inferior parietal cortex. Preschool externalizing symptoms predicted accelerated thinning within prefrontal and parietal cortices. Depression and anxiety/externalizing symptoms at later ages were not significant predictors.
CONCLUSIONS: Early childhood is a critical period of risk, experiences at this developmental stage specifically have the potential for prolonged influence on brain development. Negative early experiences collectively predicted reduced cortical thickness, but the specific neural systems impacted aligned with those typically implicated in these individual disorders/experiences.
Language: en |