Beyond family‐level adversities: Exploring the developmental timing of neighborhood disadvantage effects on the brain

Abstract

A growing literature suggests that adversity is associated with later altered brain function, particularly within the corticolimbic system that supports emotion processing and salience detection (e.g., amygdala, prefrontal cortex [PFC]). Although neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage has been shown to predict maladaptive behavioral outcomes, particularly for boys, most of the research linking adversity to corticolimbic function has focused on family-level adversities. Moreover, although animal models and studies of normative brain development suggest that there may be sensitive periods during which adversity exerts stronger effects on corticolimbic development, little prospective evidence exists in humans. Using two low-income samples of boys (n = 167; n = 77), Censusderived neighborhood disadvantage during early childhood, but not adolescence, was uniquely associated with greater amygdala, but not PFC, reactivity to ambiguous neutral faces in adolescence and young adulthood. These associations remained after accounting for several family-level adversities (e.g., low family income, harsh parenting), highlighting the independent and developmentally specific neural effects of the neighborhood context. Furthermore, in both samples, indicators measuring income and poverty status of neighbors were predictive

Neighborhood disadvantage and longitudinal brain-predicted-age trajectory during adolescence

“…Importantly, accounting for household SES and other experiences of adversity did not substantially change our findings of neighborhood-disadvantage-associated change in brainAGE. In line with past work ( Gard et al, 2021 ; Rakesh et al, 2021a ; Taylor et al, 2020 ; Rakesh et al, 2021b ), this finding shows that the effects of neighborhood context are above and beyond family-level and other adversities such as parent education and childhood maltreatment, and highlights the salience of the neighborhood environment in shaping brain development. Future work should disentangle the specific mechanisms that may be driving these effects (i.e., stress/exposure to violence and/or lower access to resources [e.g., playgrounds, libraries, low-resourced schools]; Hyde et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Future work should account for changes in these time-varying constructs when looking at relationships with brain development using extended longitudinal designs. Further, given that timing of disadvantage also plays a role in brain development ( Gard et al, 2021 ), future work should examine the role of timing of exposure in the relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and brain development. Sixth, given that some variables were not temporally separated, we could not conduct mediation analyses ( Maxwell et al, 2011 ; Maxwell & Cole, 2007 ).…”

“…Given that the study is centered around the salience of the neighborhood context and that recent work has shown unique associations between neighborhood disadvantage (as compared to family indices of SES) and alterations in brain structure ( Gard et al, 2021 ; Hyde et al, 2020 ; Taylor et al, 2020 ; Tomlinson et al, 2020 ; Whittle et al, 2017 ), we covaried for parent education (assessed using the Australian National University Four scale) as well as the experience of childhood maltreatment (total score on the total score on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire [CTQ]; Bernstein et al 1994 ; see SI for details) in order to test whether effects held when accounting for household SES and other experiences of adversity.…”

“…Past work, however, has not quantified normative development, and deviations from said development at an individual level, which would be beneficial for testing hypotheses about accelerated versus delayed development. Further, despite neighborhood disadvantage having unique effects on childhood behavioral ( Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000 ) and brain development ( Gard et al, 2021 ; Taylor et al, 2020 ; Rakesh et al, 2021b ), no work to our knowledge has examined neighborhood-disadvantage-associated deviations from typical brain development trajectories at an individual level. Using machine learning models, an individual’s brain age can be predicted based on neuroimaging data, thus allowing quantification of the extent to which an individual deviates from typical neurodevelopment.…”

Food Insecurity and Child Development: A State-of-the-Art Review

“…This model posits that child development is a dynamic process arising from complex interactions across multiple levels of influence (individual, family, institutions, community, society) that are proximal and distal to the child. The overlaying of this framework will assist in identifying not only risk factors but also the protective resources that can be drawn on to strengthen optimal child development [13,14].…”