Youth Team Sports Participation Associates With Reduced Dimensional Psychopathology Through Interaction With Biological Risk Factors.

Background: Physical activity is associated with mental health benefits in youth. Here, we used causal inference and triangulation with 2 levels of biology to substantiate relationships between sports participation and dimensional psychopathology in youths.

Methods: Baseline data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, which recruited children from 9 to 10 years of age across the United States, were included in multilevel regression models to assess relationships between lifetime participation in team sports (TS), individual sports, and nonsports activities and Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) scores.

Genetic patterning for child psychopathology is distinct from that for adults and implicates fetal cerebellar development.

Childhood psychiatric symptoms are often diffuse but can coalesce into discrete mental illnesses during late adolescence. We leveraged polygenic scores (PGSs) to parse genomic risk for childhood symptoms and to uncover related neurodevelopmental mechanisms with transcriptomic and neuroimaging data. In independent samples (Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, Generation R) a narrow cross-disorder neurodevelopmental PGS, reflecting risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and Tourette syndrome, predicted psychiatric symptoms through early adolescence with greater sensitivity than broad cross-disorder PGSs reflecting shared risk across eight psychiatric disorders, the disorder-specific PGS individually or two other narrow cross-disorder (Compulsive, Mood-Psychotic) scores.

Uncovering and mitigating bias in large, automated MRI analyses of brain development.

Large, population-based MRI studies of adolescents promise transformational insights into neurodevelopment and mental illness risk . However, MRI studies of youth are especially susceptible to motion and other artifacts . These artifacts may go undetected by automated quality control (QC) methods that are preferred in high-throughput imaging studies, 5 and can potentially introduce non-random noise into clinical association analyses.

State-Level Recreational Cannabis Legalization Is Not Differentially Associated with Cannabis Risk Perception Among Children: A Multilevel Regression Analysis.

As more states pass recreational cannabis laws (RCLs) for adults, there is concern that increasing (and state-sanctioned) cannabis acceptance will result in a reduced perception of risk of harm from cannabis among children. We aimed to discover whether children in states with RCLs had decreased perception of risk from cannabis compared with children in states with illicit cannabis. We analyzed data from the multisite multistate Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study to determine how the perception of cannabis harm among children (age at baseline: 9-10; =10,395) changes over time in states with and without RCLs.

Psychological and physiological evidence for an initial 'Rough Sketch' calculation of personal space.

Personal space has been defined as "the area individuals maintain around themselves into which others cannot intrude without arousing discomfort". However, the precise relationship between discomfort (or arousal) responses as a function of distance from an observer remains incompletely understood. Also the mechanisms involved in recognizing conspecifics and distinguishing them from other objects within personal space have not been identified.

Association of adverse prenatal exposure burden with child psychopathology in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.

Objective: Numerous adverse prenatal exposures have been individually associated with risk for psychiatric illness in the offspring. However, such exposures frequently co-occur, raising questions about their cumulative impact. We evaluated effects of cumulative adverse prenatal exposure burden on psychopathology risk in school-aged children.

Working memory load-dependent changes in cortical network connectivity estimated by machine learning.

Working memory engages multiple distributed brain networks to support goal-directed behavior and higher order cognition. Dysfunction in working memory has been associated with cognitive impairment in neuropsychiatric disorders. It is important to characterize the interactions among cortical networks that are sensitive to working memory load since such interactions can also hint at the impaired dynamics in patients with poor working memory performance.