Heterogeneity in child and adolescent brain development
Project status: Ongoing...
Profiling intra- and inter-individual differences in child and adolescent brain development
Abstract
Large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging studies offer an unprecedented opportunity for investigating child and adolescent brain development at the population level. Such studies have uncovered group-level trajectories in structural brain development, which cross-sectional research applies to examine differences in brain maturation with respect to psychopathology and cognitive development. Human pediatric neuroimaging studies have focused on untangling individual differences in brain development, but uncertainty remains as to how much these trajectories vary across the population and why. Using two waves of MRI data from over 5,000 children, we estimated individual-level brain changes across a number of neuroimaging phenotypes and profiled the variability therein due to age, sex, puberty, and social strata. This revealed a broader range of developmental trajectories in the mid puberty,compared with pre- or early puberty, and in youth from minoritized and low-income backgrounds, compared with their white peers from wealthier households.
Manuscripts
Individual differences in child and adolescent brain development
Abstract
As more and larger longitudinal, human neuroimaging studies like the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (ABCD Study®) collect and share data, the field moves closer to population neuroscience. This shift brings significant opportunities to better understand the developing brain, offering unprecedented statistical power and increased generalizability, in addition to challenges new to the human neuroimaging literature.
This work has leveraged that increased statistical power to identify small but significant associations between:
- Exposure to ambient air pollution and subcortical intracellular diffusion
- Caregiver acculturation and the mental health of both caregivers and children, in addition to child brain function, in a Hispanic/Latinx subset of participants
- Callous-unemotional traits and cortical gray matter volume
- Brain function during response inhibition and pre-adolescent self-regulation
Related ongoing work focuses on the challenges of moving to population-level developmental neuroscience, including the role of individual, environmental, and structural factors that contribute to and/or confound individual variability in child and adolescent brain development.