Faster pace of hippocampal growth mediates the association between perinatal adversity and childhood depression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early life adversity has been posited to influence the pace of structural neurodevelopment. Most research, however, has relied on cross-sectional data, which do not reveal whether the pace of neurodevelopmental change is accelerated or slowed following early exposures. In a birth cohort study that included neuroimaging data obtained at 4.5, 6, and 7.5 years of age (N=784), we examined associations among a cumulative measure of perinatal adversity relative to resources, nonlinear trajectories of hippocampal and amygdala volume, and children’s subsequent depressive symptoms at 8.5 years of age. Greater adversity was associated with reduced bilateral hippocampal body volume in early childhood, but also to faster growth in the right hippocampal body across childhood. Further, the association between adversity and childhood depressive symptoms was mediated by faster hippocampal body growth. These findings suggest that perinatal adversity is biologically embedded in hippocampal structure development, including an accelerated pace of change in the right hippocampal body that is implicated in children’s psychopathology risk. In addition, our findings suggest that reduced hippocampal volume is not inconsistent with accelerated hippocampal change; these aspects of structural development may typically co-occur, as smaller regional volumes in early childhood were associated with faster growth across childhood. Early adversity is a risk factor for the development of health problems across the lifespan, including for psychopathology in childhood (Nelson et al., 2020; Shonkoff et al., 2012). Exposure to psychosocial and biological hazards may be particularly consequential during sensitive windows, such as the perinatal period (Nelson and Gabard-Durnam, 2020). There are a range of events and conditions that constitute adversity during the perinatal period, such as low gestational age at birth, maternal smoking during pregnancy, institutionalization, and maternal depression, that have been linked to increased risk for psychopathology in offspring (Duko et al., 2020; Gotlib et al., 2023; Lund et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2010; Wade et al., 2020). Conversely, early positive experiences and environmental conditions or resources may help to offset risk related to adversity (Han et al., 2023; Masten et al., 2021), even during the perinatal period (McLoyd, 1998). Examples of such resources may include positive delivery outcomes related to the prenatal environment, such as being born at term or having an average birth weight, and factors related to perinatal care such as family income, parental mental health, and breastfeeding (Boyle et al., 2012; Hines et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2014; Roncallo et al., 2018). Adversity and resources both can be present and accumulate across multiple levels; indeed, researchers have emphasized the importance of considering their joint contributions to development (Evans et al., 2013; Han et al., 2023). From a perspective of cumulative risk and resources, evaluating the degree of adversity exposure relative to advantage may yield an index of the overall quality of early life experiences and conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".