Impacts of ambient air pollutants on brain microstructure and functional connectome development

Abstract

Air pollution poses serious health risks to children, which can have lifespan consequences. As ambient air pollution comprises chemicals with documented neurotoxic effects, it poses a particular risk to child neurodevelopment and mental health. Neuroimaging studies have uncovered links between air pollution and differences in brain structure in children, but the impact of air pollution on brain function and microstructure remains largely unknown. While structural measures of brain development can provide a high-level perspective on air pollution’s effects on the brain, microstructure provides a better estimate of the neurobiology underlying these effects and function provides a better estimate of their cognitive, behavioral, and mental health implications.

Here, we propose to leverage the ABCD Study – a longitudinal, nationwide dataset – to assess if parallel microstructural and functional brain changes in children ages 9-10 years are associated with different sources of ambient fine particulate matter. To this end, we will employ multivariate techniques (i.e., partial least squares) to uncover latent associations between sources of ambient air pollution and changes in gray matter microstructure (Aim 1), predictive connectomics to identify changes in functional subnetworks associated with sources of ambient air pollution (Aim 2), and canonical correlation analysis to investigate how changes in brain microstructure might reveal the neurobiological mechanisms underlying changes in the brain’s functional connectivity (Aim 3).