Differences in brain connections in children are related

A large new study suggests that growing up in families with poor socioeconomic conditions may have lasting effects
on children's brain development.

The study found that children from families with fewer resources had different patterns of connections between many regions and networks of the brain in
the upper grades of primary school compared to children from more privileged families and communities.

The new study, led by two neuroscientists at the University of Michigan and published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, shows that one socioeconomic factor in this study had a bigger impact on brain development than others: the number of
years of schooling that a child's parents had.

But as the researchers delved deeper, they found that the number of diplomas or degrees earned by parents wasn't the only factor
influencing brain connectivity.
They also discovered the role of parenting activities, such as reading with children, discussing ideas with them, taking them to museums, or other cognitive activities
.

The new study used brain scans and behavioral data
from more than 5,800 adolescents from diverse backgrounds across the country.
This is the largest study to date on how socioeconomic factors affect children's "functional connectome," which is a map
of the interconnections of hundreds of regions of the brain.

This may also be related to
public policy.
By standard definition, one in seven American children lives in poverty, and half qualify for free or reduced school lunches
.

"We need to better understand how social and economic inequalities shape children's brains as they grow and develop, and our findings point to the critical role of parents' educational attainment and the rich education they provide at home," said
Chandra Sripada, MD, lead author of the study and professor of psychiatry and philosophy at the University of Michigan.
"Because of our sample size and 'whole brain' analysis approach, we felt that the results of this study were more reliable than previous work, which tended to look at dozens of children and a small number of brain regions
at once.
"

Fundamentals of scanning and economics

The large-scale study was prompted by the National ABCD Research Program, which enrolled more than 11,000 children at 22 sites across the country, including hundreds of children
who participated through the University of Michigan Center for Psychiatry and Addiction.
The new study is based on more than half of that data, including brain scans
using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

When the children just lay on the scanners without being asked to do anything, the scans measured their brain activity
.
This resting state allows neuroscientists to see the level of communication between different regions of the brain, along functional connections
that develop from prenatal to childhood and adolescence.

Ripada and colleagues analyzed the data in three ways—the whole brain, all major networks within the brain, and all individual brain connections—to ensure that their findings were as reliable
as possible.

The team used machine learning to "teach" a computer to predict children's socioeconomic resource levels
based solely on interconnected patterns between brain regions.
They showed that the patterns learned by the computer could be generalized to new groups of
children that computers had not "seen" before.
The analysis revealed that the patterns of brain connections vary widely among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds
.

The researchers looked at a composite measure of a child's family's overall socioeconomic resources, combining indicators
of parental education, family income, and community resource levels.
In addition, the researchers examined the unique contributions
of each of these three socioeconomic factors.

This is why
parental education is the factor most associated with changes in brain connectivity.

"The influence of household socioeconomic resources on functional connectivity is massively distributed in young people's brains," Sripada said
.
"We didn't see an effect on
localization in a discrete location or specific brain circuit.
Instead, there are relatively small effects that are distributed throughout the brain, although when these individual effects come together, they make up a powerful, reliable detection signal
.
”

This, he notes, reflects an evolving understanding of the genes involved in diseases ranging from schizophrenia to diabetes, where the small effects of many genes combine to form a holistic picture
.

Is it important for parents to educate or parenting activities?

For 3223 children, the researchers were able to analyze additional data to explore which factors might help explain why parental education was associated
with differences in children's brain connectivity patterns.

They found that more educated parents who participated in more family enrichment activities scored higher on tests of cognitive function and performed better
in school.

"Based on these results, we believe that parental education may be an important part of a more complex pathway through which socioeconomic differences enter the 'subcutaneous' and shape the developing brain
," Heitzger said.
As data from long-term ABCD studies continue to become available, we look forward to exploring how different factors affect physical and mental health, drug and alcohol use, and more
.
" ”

Ripada said he hopes the new findings will help address a "reproducibility crisis" in neuroscience, in which researchers examine very small samples and their results won't be reproduced
in follow-up small studies.
He hopes that the reliable, reliable results from large studies will increase trust in neuroscience and make it more likely that the findings will be used to inform
social and policy issues.

Socioeconomic resources are associated with distributed alterations of the brain’s intrinsic functional architecture in youth