Socioeconomic disadvantage and altered corticostriatal circuitry in urban youth

Abstract

Socioeconomic disadvantage (SED) experienced in early life is linked to a range of risk behaviors and diseases. Neuroimaging research indicates that this association is mediated by functional changes in corticostriatal reward systems that modulate goal-directed behavior, reward evaluation, and affective processing. Existing research has focused largely on adults and within-household measures as an index of SED, despite evidence that broader community-level SED (e.g., neighborhood poverty levels) has significant and sometimes distinct effects on development and health outcomes. Here, we test effects of both household- and community-level SED on resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) of the ventral striatum (VS) in 100 racially and economically diverse children and adolescents (ages 6-17). We observed unique effects of household income and community SED on VS circuitry such that higher community SED was associated with reduced rsFC between the VS and an anterior region of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), whereas lower household income was associated with increased rsFC between the VS and the cerebellum, inferior temporal lobe, and lateral prefrontal cortex. Lower VS-mPFC rsFC was also associated with higher self-reported anxiety symptomology, and rsFC mediated the link between community SED and anxiety. These results indicate unique effects of community-level SED on corticostriatal reward circuitry that can be detected in early life, which carries implications for future interventions and targeted therapies. In addition, our findings raise intriguing questions about the distinct pathways through which specific sources of SED can affect brain and emotional development.

Non-linear effects of socioeconomic status on brain development: associations between parental occupation, cortical thickness and language skills in childhood and adolescence

“…Electroencephalographic (EEG) studies have found evidence of a maturational lag in the prefrontal cortex (Otero 1997) in addition to left-frontal hypoactivity (Tomarken et al 2004) in lower SES preschool children and adolescents, respectively; these findings correspond to the findings of behavioral studies examining language and attention differences between groups (Hackman and Farah 2009). A review of fMRI studies suggest decreased functional specialization in language regions for low-SES kindergartners (Raizada et al 2008), less mature frontal gamma power in low-SES children (Tomalski et al 2013), and decreased functional connectivity at resting-state in low-SES children and adults (Sripada et al 2014;Barch et al 2016;Marshall et al 2018), suggesting a comparative delay in functional brain development (Tooley et al 2018). In agreement with these functional studies, our findings of asymmetric cortical correlates of SES disparities, with reduced thickness for participants with lower SES in the left-hemispheric language-related regions with concurrent decrease in vocabulary and reading scores also suggest delayed cortical development with behavioural consequences for participants with lower SES.…”

Narrative Medicine Meets Planetary Health: Mindsets Matter in the Anthropocene

“…There is little doubt that higher levels of chronic, low-grade stress are experienced in South Los Angeles' disadvantaged neighborhoods compared to green (rich in both vegetation and money), billboard-free neighborhoods, like Bel Air; the emerging research indicates that neighborhood-level deprivation-low socioeconomic position and the entire package of grey space-is manifesting as inflammation, oxidative stress, disturbances to the gut microbiome (dysbiosis), alterations in the brain reward system, and metabolic dysregulation [169][170][171][172][173][174]. Research shows that baseline psychological stress compounds the inflammatory and detrimental circulatory responses to a single fast-food-style meal [175,176].…”

The Ethics of Medical Data Donation

“…As in the case of psychology and genomics, neuroscience research is largely based on data of individuals from WEIRD societies (Falk et al 2013), despite a plethora of studies showing that brain development is affected by socioeconomic status, early life stress, or cultural differences (Hackman et al 2010;Marshall et al 2018;Chan et al 2018;Duval et al 2017;Liddell and Jobson 2016). Indeed, within or across household socio-economic variables during childhood, such as family income, parental education (Ellwood-Lowe et al 2018;Weissman et al 2018) or neighbourhood poverty levels (Marshall et al 2018), can be traced on trajectories of brain development, and result in differences in brain structure (Ellwood-Lowe et al 2018) and cognitive functions (Hackman and Farah 2018), or gene expression (Parker et al 2017). Differences in brain networks according to socio-economic status are also evident during adolescence (Weissman et al 2018) and adulthood (Chan et al 2018).…”