Association of Neural Connectome With Early Experiences of Abuse in Adults

Abstract

ImportanceMore than 10% of children experience sexual, physical, or emotional abuse, and abuse experienced during sensitive neurodevelopmental periods is associated with a greater risk of psychiatric disorders.ObjectiveTo investigate the extent to which a history of abuse is associated with alterations in the intrinsic functional connectome of the adult brain independent from the restriction of associated psychiatric conditions.Design, Setting, and ParticipantsThis cohort study assessed data from 768 adult participants from the greater Sydney, Australia, area who were included in the study without diagnostic restrictions and categorized based on a history of childhood sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse. Data were collected from January 1, 2009, to December 31, 2015; data analysis was performed from October 1, 2020, to March 31, 2022.Main Outcomes and MeasuresOutcomes were structured psychiatric interview responses, self-report of the frequency and extent of various types of negative experiences in childhood and adolescence, and intrinsic functional connectivity derived from 5 functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks and estimated among 436 brain regions, comprising intranetwork and internetwork connectivity of 8 large-scale brain networks.ResultsAmong the 647 individuals with usable data (330 female [51.0%]; mean [SD] age, 33.3 [12.0] years; age range, 18.2-69.2 years), history of abuse was associated with greater likelihood of a current psychiatric illness (odds ratio, 4.55; 95% CI, 3.07-6.72; P < .001) and with greater depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms (mean difference, 20.4; 95% CI, 16.1-24.7; P < .001). An altered connectome signature of higher connectivity within somatomotor, dorsal, and ventral attention networks and between these networks and executive control and default mode networks was observed in individuals with a history of abuse experienced during childhood (n = 127) vs those without a history of abuse (n = 442; mean difference, 0.07; 95% CI, 0.05-0.08; familywise, Bonferroni-corrected P = .01; Cohen d = 0.82) and compared with those who experienced abuse in adolescence (n = 78; mean difference, 0.06; 95% CI, 0.04-0.08]; familywise, Bonferroni-corrected P < .001; Cohen d = 0.68). Connectome alterations were not observed for those who experienced abuse in adolescence. Connectivity of this signature was transdiagnostic and independent of the nature and frequency of abuse, sex, or current symptomatic state.Conclusions and RelevanceFindings highlight the associations of exposure to abuse before and during adolescence with the whole-brain functional connectome. The experience of child abuse was found to be associated with physiologic changes in intrinsic connectivity, independent of psychopathology, in a way that may affect functioning of systems responsible for perceptual processing and attention.

Sex addiction 101: Empirical support, treatment considerations, and future directions

“…Experiences of trauma, including adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, can influence a person's physiology, brain development, and functioning (Elton et al., 2014; Korgaonkar et al., 2023; Park et al., 2021). These changes include the brain systems and processes that involve dopamine (Park et al., 2021).…”

Global topology of human connectome is insensitive to early life environments – A prospective longitudinal study of the general population

“…Individuals with a history of early adversity tend to have sparser and more heterogeneous connectomes when assessed with functional MRI (Goetschius et al, 2020); however see also, Korgaonkar et al (2023), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) (Ohashi et al, 2017(Ohashi et al, , 2019Puetz et al, 2017), altered centrality of key regions in MRI-derived morphometric similarity networks (Teicher et al, 2014), and decreased global efficiency of the DTI-derived connectome (Kim et al, 2019).…”

“…Individuals with a history of early adversity tend to have sparser and more heterogeneous connectomes when assessed with functional MRI (Goetschius et al., 2020); however see also, Korgaonkar et al. (2023), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) (Ohashi et al., 2017, 2019; Puetz et al., 2017), altered centrality of key regions in MRI‐derived morphometric similarity networks (Teicher et al., 2014), and decreased global efficiency of the DTI‐derived connectome (Kim et al., 2019). Recently, a rodent study using a computational model that compresses whole‐brain networks into two parameters—which approximate the ‘cost’ and ‘value’ of connections—detected a difference in the DTI‐derived connectomes of mice exposed to unpredictable postnatal stress versus unexposed mice: the former appear to have been subject to weaker constraints on the formation of structural connections (Carozza et al., 2023).…”