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Whole-brain white matter variation across childhood environments

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sofia Carozza1,2 (scarozza@bwh.harvard.edu), Isaiah Kletenik1,2, Duncan Astle3, Lee Schwamm4, Amar Dhand1,2; 1Harvard Medical School, 2Brigham & Women's Hospital, 3University of Cambridge, 4Yale School of Medicine

Early-life adversity has been associated with structural differences in several major white matter tracts. While there is reason to expect that such microstructural changes may in fact be observed throughout the adversity-exposed brain, and that these global changes are relevant for cognitive difficulties, evidence in support of these hypotheses remains lacking. This poster aims to test these possibilities in data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (N = 9,082, female = 4,327). Using partial least squares (PLS) regressions, we found extensive cross-sectional associations with lower white matter fractional anisotropy (FA) and streamline count in the brains of 9- and 10-year-old children exposed to a range of experiences, including prenatal risk factors, interpersonal adversity, household economic deprivation, and neighborhood adversity. A matching analysis implicated reductions in FA in later difficulties with mental arithmetic and receptive language. Furthermore, a PLS path analysis showed that white matter FA mediates the detrimental effect of adversity on cognition across domains later in adolescence. These findings advance a white matter-based account of the neural and cognitive effects of adversity, which supports developmental theories that emphasize the role of inter-regional connectivity in regional maturation.

Topic Area: NEUROANATOMY

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March 29–April 1  |  2025

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