I am so so so lucky to work with an incredible team of investigators on the eLABE study & in a fantastic environment at WashU and specifically in the division of pediatric neurology @washuneurology.bsky.social

This evidence suggests that interventions to promote adaptive brain development may need to begin prenatally and underscores the importance of social supports for expectant parents that reduce exposures associated with social disadvantage.

Our findings suggest that maternal prenatal environment may initiate the process by which functional networks are altered by social disadvantage, shaping the foundations of functional brain organization upon which later experience-dependent processes build.

Our group has demonstrated that associations between social disadvantage & brain development begin in utero across three modalities (brain volume, white matter microstructure, & now FC)

More work is needed to determine the significance, malleability, and persistence of these alterations in FC

In line with what has been found in children/teens, reduced FC between the amygdala & mePFC at birth was associated with prenatal social disadvantage

Yet, this pattern was similar across subcortical structures potentially indicating a shared mechanism/vulnerability

Most all functional networks contained variation in FC that could be used to estimate prenatal exposure to social disadvantage

Late developing networks key to executive function & behavioral adaptation (ventral attention, dorsal attention, fronto parietal, & somatomotor) contained unique variation

Multivariate predictive modeling revealed that neonatal functional connectivity varied as a function of prenatal exposure to social disadvantage (R=0.43, R^2=0.18), with validation in an independent sample (n=175)

As part of the Early Life Adversity & Biological Embedding (eLABE) Study, pregnant individuals were recruited, prenatal social disadvantage was assessed across trimesters (Luby et al. 2023), and their healthy, full-term offspring were imaged to obtain FC during the first weeks of life (N=261)

Given the limited social mobility in the US, childhood social disadvantage is often preceded by maternal social disadvantage during pregnancy, making it hard to disentangle the pre- & post-natal exposures

We measured FC at birth to try to isolate the association with prenatal social disadvantage

How do these alterations in functional networks arise?

H1: the quality, predicability, &/or nature of a child's experiences alter coactivations to alter FC

H2: response to maternal social disadvantage during pregnancy (e.g., immune, epigenetic) alters FC in utero and then persists into childhood

Childhood social disadvantage is linked to risk for poor neruodevelopmental outcomes & also associated with altered FC in the amygdala & multiple functional networks