Material hardship, prefrontal cortex–amygdala structure, and internalizing symptoms in children

Abstract

Material hardship, or difficulty affording basic resources such as food, housing, utilities, and health care, increases children's risk for internalizing problems. The uncinate fasciculus (UNC) and two of the gray matter regions it connects—the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and amygdala—may play important roles in the neural mechanisms underlying these associations. We investigated associations among material hardship, UNC microstructure, OFC and amygdala structure, and internalizing symptoms in children. Participants were 5–9‐year‐old children (N = 94, 61% female) from socioeconomically diverse families. Parents completed questionnaires assessing material hardship and children's internalizing symptoms. High‐resolution, T1‐weighted magnetic resonance imaging (n = 51), and diffusion tensor imaging (n = 58) data were acquired. UNC fractional anisotropy (FA), medial OFC surface area, and amygdala gray matter volume were extracted. Greater material hardship was significantly associated with lower UNC FA, smaller amygdala volume, and higher internalizing symptoms in children, after controlling for age, sex, and family income‐to‐needs ratio. Lower UNC FA significantly mediated the association between material hardship and internalizing symptoms in girls but not boys. These findings are consistent with the notion that material hardship may lead to altered white matter microstructure and gray matter structure in neural networks critical to emotion processing and regulation.

Assessment of Parent Income and Education, Neighborhood Disadvantage, and Child Brain Structure

“…Socioeconomic status has consistently been shown to be associated with brain structure during childhood and adolescence. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] However, findings have been mixed in terms of brain regions and direction of association. 12 These differences may be a result of SES being operationalized in various ways, including as parental income, parental educational attainment, parental occupational prestige, or neighborhood quality.…”

“…Socioeconomic status has consistently been shown to be associated with brain structure during childhood and adolescence . However, findings have been mixed in terms of brain regions and direction of association .…”

Early life stress, prenatal secondhand smoke exposure, and the development of internalizing symptoms across childhood

“…Maternal demoralization reflects mothers’ subjective feelings of incompetence and associated feelings of psychological distress [ 97 ] that have been linked to risk for maternal depression [ 98 , 99 ], which in turn has been linked to poor child emotional outcomes [ 99 – 103 ]. Material hardship – the inability to meet basic needs – has been directly linked with children’s risk for internalizing problems [ 104 , 105 ]. In humans, material hardship increases risk for postpartum depression [ 105 – 108 ].…”

Socioeconomic factors, stress, hair cortisol, and white matter microstructure in children

“…One possibility is therefore that chronically elevated cortisol in childhood may lead to accelerated myelination in certain white matter tracts. Indeed, some work has linked higher cortisol to increased FA in other white matter tracts such as the uncinate fasciculus (Kircanski et al., 2019; Dennison et al., 2019; though see Lichtin et al., 2021, which linked material deprivation to lower FA in this tract). In the future, longitudinal research is needed to elucidate developmental mechanisms and discern how stress physiology relates to changes in white matter organization over time.…”