Developmental Trajectories of the Orbitofrontal Cortex and Anhedonia in Middle Childhood and Risk for Substance Use in Adolescence in a Longitudinal Sample of Depressed and Healthy Preschoolers.

Objective: Deficits in reward processing are established in mood and substance use disorders and are known risk factors for these disorders. Volume reductions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the striatum, regions that subserve neural response to reward, have been shown to be related to anhedonia in depressive and substance use disorders. The authors sought to investigate how structural maturation of these regions in childhood varies with level of anhedonia and predicts later substance use.

Emotion dysregulation and functional connectivity in children with and without a history of major depressive disorder.

Recent interest has emerged in understanding the neural mechanisms by which deficits in emotion regulation (ER) early in development may relate to later depression. Corticolimbic alterations reported in emotion dysregulation and depression may be one possible link. We examined the relationships between emotion dysregulation in school age, corticolimbic resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) in preadolescence, and depressive symptoms in adolescence.

Early Childhood Adverse Experiences, Inferior Frontal Gyrus Connectivity, and the Trajectory of Externalizing Psychopathology.

Objective: Early adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to the development of both internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. In our prior work, we found that ACEs predicted reductions in the volume of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), a brain region important for impulse control and emotion regulation. Here we tested the hypothesis that ACEs might influence child behavioral outcomes through an impact on IFG functional connectivity, which may influence impulsive or risk-taking behavior.

Shyness and Trajectories of Functional Network Connectivity Over Early Adolescence.

High shyness during early adolescence is associated with impaired peer relationships and risk for psychiatric disorders. Little is known, however, about the relation between shyness and trajectories of brain development over early adolescence. The current study longitudinally examined trajectories of resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fc) within four brain networks in 147 adolescents.

Association Between Early Life Adversity and Risk for Poor Emotional and Physical Health in Adolescence: A Putative Mechanistic Neurodevelopmental Pathway.

Importance: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes. However, the mechanism of this effect, critical to enhancing public health, remains poorly understood.

Objective: To investigate the neurodevelopmental trajectory of the association between early ACEs and adolescent general and emotional health outcomes.

Neural Correlates of Reward Processing in Depressed and Healthy Preschool-Age Children.

Objective: Adults and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD) show a blunted neural response to rewards. Depression has been validated in children as young as age 3; however, it remains unclear whether blunted response to reward is also a core feature of preschool-onset depression. If so, this would provide further validation for the continuity of the neural correlates of depression across the life span and would identify a potential target for treatment in young children.

Early Adversity, Psychopathology, and Latent Class Profiles of Global Physical Health From Preschool Through Early Adolescence.

Objective: The purpose of the present report was to describe the longitudinal trajectories of physical health beginning during preschool and continuing into early adolescence; explore whether these trajectories were predicted by psychosocial adversity, family income-to-needs ratio, and psychiatric disorders occurring during the preschool period; and determine whether psychiatric disorders mediated these relations.

Methods: Participants included 296 children participating in a longitudinal study of early-onset psychopathology spanning 10 years. Semistructured clinical interviews were conducted with caregivers to determine children's psychiatric diagnoses between ages 3 and 6 years.

Variation in common preschool sleep problems as an early predictor for depression and anxiety symptom severity across time.

Background: Child and adolescent psychopathology has been linked to increased sleep problems, but there has been less investigation of this relationship in younger samples with early-onset psychopathology. This study examined three specific but commonly observed aspects of sleep behaviors in young children - (i) Sleep onset latency, (ii) Refusal to sleep alone, and (iii) Nighttime awakenings - measured during preschool, and investigated whether these sleep problems predicted anxiety and/or depression across the next 6 years until school age (ages 9-13).

Methods: Data were analyzed from N = 292 participants from a prospective longitudinal study of preschool-age children (ages 3-6).

Breastfeeding and Childhood IQ: The Mediating Role of Gray Matter Volume.

Objective: A substantial body of literature has established the positive effect of breastfeeding on child developmental outcomes. There is increasing consensus that breastfed children have higher IQs after accounting for key variables, including maternal education, IQ, and socioeconomic status. Cross-sectional investigations of the effects of breastfeeding on structural brain development suggest that breastfed infants have larger whole brain, cortical, and white matter volumes.

Preschool is a sensitive period for the influence of maternal support on the trajectory of hippocampal development.

Building on well-established animal data demonstrating the effects of early maternal support on hippocampal development and adaptive coping, a few longitudinal studies suggest that early caregiver support also impacts human hippocampal development. How caregiving contributes to human hippocampal developmental trajectories, whether there are sensitive periods for these effects, as well as whether related variation in hippocampal development predicts later childhood emotion functioning are of major public health importance. The current study investigated these questions in a longitudinal study of preschoolers assessed annually for behavioral and emotional development, including observed caregiver support.

Early Childhood Behavioral Inhibition Predicts Cortical Thickness in Adulthood.

Objective: Behavioral inhibition (BI) during early childhood predicts risk for anxiety disorders and altered cognitive control in adolescence. Although BI has been linked to variation in brain function through adulthood, few studies have examined relations between early childhood BI and adult brain structure.

Method: The relation between early childhood BI and cortical thickness in adulthood was examined in a cohort of individuals followed since early childhood (N = 53, mean age 20.

Effect of Hippocampal and Amygdala Connectivity on the Relationship Between Preschool Poverty and School-Age Depression.

Objective: In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that poverty experienced in early childhood, as measured by income-to-needs ratio, has an impact on functional brain connectivity at school age, which in turn mediates influences on child negative mood/depression.

Method: Participants were from a prospective longitudinal study of emotion development. Preschoolers 3-5 years of age were originally ascertained from primary care and day care sites in the St.

Latent class profiles of depressive symptoms from early to middle childhood: predictors, outcomes, and gender effects.

Background: There has been little available data to inform the predictors and outcomes of latent class trajectories of depressive symptoms beginning during preschool and continuing throughout school age. Further, the extant literature in this domain has been limited by the use of parent report checklists of nonspecific 'internalizing' psychopathology rather than diagnostic interviews for depression.

Methods: To address these gaps in the literature, this study applied growth mixture modeling to depressive symptom severity endorsed by children and/or their caregivers (N = 348) during a structured clinical interview in a 10-year longitudinal dataset spanning from preschool into late school age.

Functional connectivity of the amygdala and subgenual cingulate during cognitive reappraisal of emotions in children with MDD history is associated with rumination.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is characterized by poor emotion regulation. Rumination, a maladaptive strategy for dealing with negative emotions, is common in MDD, and is associated with impaired inhibition and cognitive inflexibility that may contribute to impaired emotion regulation abilities. However, it is unclear whether rumination is differently associated with emotion regulation in individuals with MDD history (MDD-ever) and healthy individuals.

Early Childhood Depression and Alterations in the Trajectory of Gray Matter Maturation in Middle Childhood and Early Adolescence.

Importance: The trajectory of cortical gray matter development in childhood has been characterized by early neurogenesis and volume increase, peaking at puberty followed by selective elimination and myelination, resulting in volume loss and thinning. This inverted U-shaped trajectory, as well as cortical thickness, has been associated with cognitive and emotional function. Synaptic pruning-based volume decline has been related to experience-dependent plasticity in animals.

Cognitive Control Deficits in Shifting and Inhibition in Preschool Age Children are Associated with Increased Depression and Anxiety Over 7.5 Years of Development.

Although depression and anxiety are common in youth (Costello et al. 2003), factors that put children at risk for such symptoms are not well understood. The current study examined associations between early childhood cognitive control deficits and depression and anxiety over the course of development through school age.

Emotion Awareness Predicts Body Mass Index Percentile Trajectories in Youth.

Objective: To examine the rate of change in body mass index (BMI) percentile across 3 years in relation to emotion identification ability and brain-based reactivity in emotional processing regions.

Study Design: A longitudinal sample of 202 youths completed 3 functional magnetic resonance imaging-based facial processing tasks and behavioral emotion differentiation tasks. We examined the rate of change in the youth's BMI percentile as a function of reactivity in emotional processing brain regions and behavioral emotion identification tasks using multilevel modeling.

Anterior insula volume and guilt: neurobehavioral markers of recurrence after early childhood major depressive disorder.

Importance: This is the first study to date to examine volumetric alterations in the anterior insula (AI) as a potential biomarker for the course of childhood major depressive disorder (MDD).

Objectives: To examine whether children with a history of preschool-onset (PO) MDD show reduced AI volume, whether a specific symptom of PO MDD (pathological guilt) is related to AI volume reduction (given the known relationship between AI and guilt processing), and whether AI volumes predict subsequent likelihood of having an episode of MDD.

Design, Setting, And Participants: In a prospective longitudinal study, 306 children (age range, 3.

Trajectories of preschool disorders to full DSM depression at school age and early adolescence: continuity of preschool depression.

Objective: Preschool-onset depression, a developmentally adapted form of depression arising between ages 3 and 6, has demonstrated numerous validated features, including characteristic alterations in stress reactivity and brain function. This syndrome is characterized by subthreshold DSM criteria for major depressive disorder, raising questions about its clinical significance. To clarify the utility and public health significance of the preschool-onset depression construct, the authors investigated diagnostic outcomes of preschool children at school age and in adolescence.

Neural activation associated with the cognitive emotion regulation of sadness in healthy children.

When used effectively, cognitive reappraisal of distressing events is a highly adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategy, with impairments in cognitive reappraisal associated with greater risk for psychopathology. Despite extensive literature examining the neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal in healthy and psychiatrically ill adults, there is a dearth of data to inform the neural bases of CER in children, a key gap in the literature necessary to map the developmental trajectory of cognitive reappraisal. In this fMRI study, psychiatrically healthy schoolchildren were instructed to use cognitive reappraisal to modulate their emotional reactions and responses of negative affect after viewing sad photos.

The effects of poverty on childhood brain development: the mediating effect of caregiving and stressful life events.

IMPORTANCE The study provides novel data to inform the mechanisms by which poverty negatively impacts childhood brain development. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the income-to-needs ratio experienced in early childhood impacts brain development at school age and to explore the mediators of this effect. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This study was conducted at an academic research unit at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis.

Blunted stress cortisol reactivity and failure to acclimate to familiar stress in depressed and sub-syndromal children.

Depressed adults have shown blunted or elevated cortisol reactivity in response to various forms of psychosocial stress. However, there have been few studies of cortisol reactivity in children who had early onset depression or a history of depression during the preschool-school period. The present study utilized a laboratory stress paradigm and collected salivary cortisol from preschoolers at baseline (ages 3-5 years) and 24-month follow-up (ages 5-7 years).

Parenting practices in pregnancy smokers compared to non smokers.

Background: The present investigation compared parenting practices in a sample of preschoolers whose mothers reported smoking during pregnancy versus those who did not.

Methods: A sample of n = 216, 3.0- to 5.

Structural-functional correlations between hippocampal volume and cortico-limbic emotional responses in depressed children.

Although hippocampal atrophy and altered functional brain responses to emotional stimuli have been found in major depressive disorder (MDD), the relationship between the two is not yet well understood. The present study focused on children with and without a history of preschool onset MDD (PO-MDD) and directly examined the relations between hippocampal volume and functional brain activation to affect-eliciting stimuli. Children completed annual diagnostic assessments starting at preschool.