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

在世界各地，COVID-19大流行对日常生活产生了深刻的破坏性影响。对于处于脆弱发育时期（如青春期）的儿童来说，限制对其身心和认知健康至关重要的活动可能会产生广泛但难以预测的负面影响。具体来说，压力、恐惧和孤独的增加可能会对大脑发育和支持关键功能（如决策和社会认知）的神经回路的组织产生不利影响。为了解决阐明大流行对发育中的大脑影响的迫切需要，该项目将使用尖端分析工具，在青少年大脑认知发展（ABCD）研究中利用来自大量青少年样本的多模式数据。这项工作的总体目标是系统地量化大流行对认知中起基本作用的大脑网络的影响，并更好地了解其组织中反映长期认知缺陷风险增加的方面。该项目将利用ABCD研究的数据财富和新的计算方法，目标是量化2019冠状病毒病大流行的多方面不利影响对神经回路（连接组）的调节。为此，我们将开发新的网络分析/拓扑测量、分层统计模型和广泛的模拟。这些工具将应用于疫情爆发前收集的功能磁共振成像数据，并将比较发达和成熟网络的拓扑特性与认知和心理健康结果的关系。大规模模拟将基于受干扰的连接体预测结果变化。疫情爆发后收集的神经影像学数据将用于验证这些预测。该项目的研究结果可能会对神经回路的复原力和脆弱性提供变革性的见解，以应对全球大流行等大规模事件。这些发现可以用来开发有效的干预措施，以尽量减少/防止对儿童认知结果的有害长期影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.