Prenatal social disadvantage is associated with alterations in functional networks at birth.

Childhood exposure to social disadvantage is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders and poor developmental, educational, and occupational outcomes, presumably because adverse exposures alter the neurodevelopmental processes that contribute to risk trajectories. Yet, given the limited social mobility in the United States and other countries, childhood social disadvantage is frequently preceded by maternal social disadvantage during pregnancy, potentially altering fetal brain development during a period of high neuroplasticity through hormonal, microbiome, epigenetic, and immune factors that cross the placenta and fetal blood-brain barrier. The current study examines prenatal social disadvantage to determine whether these exposures in utero are associated with alterations in functional brain networks as early as birth.

Early Life Neuroimaging: The Generalizability of Cortical Area Parcellations Across Development.

The cerebral cortex comprises discrete cortical areas that form during development. Accurate area parcellation in neuroimaging studies enhances statistical power and comparability across studies. The formation of cortical areas is influenced by intrinsic embryonic patterning as well as extrinsic inputs, particularly through postnatal exposure.

Prenatal environment is associated with the pace of cortical network development over the first three years of life.

Environmental influences on brain structure and function during early development have been well-characterized, but whether early environments are associated with the pace of brain development is not clear. In pre-registered analyses, we use flexible non-linear models to test the theory that prenatal disadvantage is associated with differences in trajectories of intrinsic brain network development from birth to three years (n = 261). Prenatal disadvantage was assessed using a latent factor of socioeconomic disadvantage that included measures of mother's income-to-needs ratio, educational attainment, area deprivation index, insurance status, and nutrition.

Associations between Parenting and Cognitive and Language Abilities at 2 Years of Age Depend on Prenatal Exposure to Disadvantage.

Objective: To investigate whether parenting or neonatal brain volumes mediate associations between prenatal social disadvantage (PSD) and cognitive/language abilities and whether these mechanisms vary by level of disadvantage.

Study Design: Pregnant women were recruited prospectively from obstetric clinics in St Louis, Missouri. PSD encompassed access to social (eg, education) and material (eg, income to needs, health insurance, area deprivation, and nutrition) resources during pregnancy.

Associations between prenatal adversity and neonatal white matter microstructure on language outcomes at age 2 years.

Background: Early life adversity is associated with microstructural alterations in white matter regions that subserve language. However, the mediating and moderating pathways between adversities experienced and key neonatal white matter tracts including the corpus callosum (CC), superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF), arcuate fasciculus (AF), inferior fronto- occipital fasciculus (IFOF), and uncinate on early language outcomes remains unknown.

Methods: This longitudinal study includes 160 neonates, oversampled for prenatal exposure to adversity, who underwent diffusion MRI (dMRI) in the first weeks of life.