Resilience and Vulnerability of the Developing Brain's Connectome during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profoundly disruptive impact on everyday life. For children at vulnerable periods of development, such as adolescence, restrictions on activities that are critical to their physical, mental and cognitive health may have extensive but difficult to predict negative effects. Specifically, increased stress, fear and loneliness, may have detrimental effects on brain development and the organization of neural circuits that support critical functions, such as decision-making and social cognition. To address the urgent need to elucidate the pandemic’s impact on the developing brain, this project will use cutting-edge analytic tools to harness multimodal data from a large sample of adolescents in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The overarching goal of this work is to systematically quantify the pandemic’s effects on brain networks that play a fundamental role in cognition, and to better understand aspects of their organization that reflect an increased risk of longer-term cognitive deficits. This project will leverage the data wealth of the ABCD study and novel computation approaches, with the goal to quantify modulations of neural circuits (the connectome) by the multifaceted adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, we will develop novel network analyses/topological measures, hierarchical statistical models and extensive simulations. These tools will be applied to fMRI data collected prior to the outbreak, and topological properties of developed and maturating networks will be compared in association with cognitive and mental health outcomes. Large-scale simulations will predict outcome changes based on perturbed connectomes. Neuroimaging data collected following the outbreak will be used to validate these predictions. Findings from this project may provide transformative insights into the resilience and vulnerability of developing neural circuits to large-scale events such as a global pandemic. These findings could be leveraged to develop efficient interventions to minimize/prevent detrimental long-term effects on cognitive outcomes in children.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.