Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
Archival ReportUnraveling the Consequences of Childhood Maltreatment: Deviations From Typical Functional Neurodevelopment Mediate the Relationship Between Maltreatment History and Depressive Symptoms
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were from a large longitudinal study, the OADS (Orygen Adolescent Development Study) [see Whittle et al. (40) for a detailed description]. Briefly, OADS is a longitudinal study that aims to investigate risk and resilience factors for adolescent mental health. Informed consent was obtained from all participants and their parent or guardian at each study wave in accordance with the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Participants underwent
Demographic Information
Demographic information is shown in Table 1 (see Figure S1 for histograms).
Development Is Associated With Widespread Changes in Whole-Brain rsFC
We found longitudinal increases in connectivity across 341 connections and 114 regions (p < .001) (Figure 1A). These were primarily within-network changes: SN (12% of total significant connections), SMN (8%), DMN (5%), and VN (8%). Increases in connectivity were found between some networks, including SN-SMN (18%), DAN-SN (14%), and DAN-LN (5%) (Figure 1B, C). From age 16 to age 19, we found decreases in connectivity
Discussion
The aim of the present study was to examine associations between childhood maltreatment and longitudinal and cross-sectional alterations in rsFC during adolescence. We report that maltreatment was associated with increases in FC primarily between corticocortical circuits from mid adolescence to late adolescence. We also report male-specific associations between maltreatment and increases in rsFC in several connections. Cross-sectionally, we found maltreatment-related increases in FC in
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
This work was supported by the Colonial Foundation, National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) (Program Grant No. 350241, Senior Research Fellowship Grant No. 1136649 [to AZ], and Career Development Fellowship Grant No. 1125504 [to SW]), Australian Research Council (Discovery Grant Nos. DP0878136 and DP1092637), University of Melbourne Research Scholarship (to DR), and Trinity College Dublin Pathfinder Award (to CK).
The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential
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2023, Biological PsychiatryCitation Excerpt :DMN resting-state functional connectivity reflects, at least to some degree, structural interconnections between DMN areas (83), and impairments in the structural and maturational covariance of DMN regions in infants have been related to stress-provoking early-life experiences such as preterm birth (84), which seem to delay or accelerate the developmental course of the brain in a region-specific manner (85,86). Taken together, these data are consistent with the ideas that the observed increase in functional connectivity of the DMN is triggered by early adverse environmental experiences [but see (87)], is relevant to mental health, and is the result of early stress–induced structural circuit reorganization during vulnerable neurodevelopmental time windows. At the same time, the developmental course of this connectivity phenotype has not been fully elucidated, and it remains unclear whether the observed increase in connectivity reflects an acceleration or a delay in DMN development caused by early adversity.