Studying the effect of different environmental influences on early structural brain development in neonates followed up at 5 years old in Uttar .....

低收入和中等收入国家（LMICs）三分之一的幼儿未能达到认知或社会情感发展的基本里程碑（McCoy, 2016）。从受孕开始，发育中的大脑就越来越专注于对婴儿环境的反应。在此期间暴露在逆境环境中可能会永久性地影响发育轨迹，并最终导致以后生活中的认知缺陷和神经障碍。新生儿神经影像学可以作为一种中间表型来证明遗传、环境和产前对发育中的大脑的影响（Jha et al., 2018）。在低资源环境下使用神经成像技术存在许多挑战，行为电池具有文化偏见，因为它们是为高资源环境开发的。因此，尽管90%的年轻人（10-24岁）生活在发展中国家，但中低收入国家在发育神经成像或神经认知研究中的代表性非常有限（2016年联合国发展报告）。结构MRI （Elwell, C 2020）有可能提供客观的、普遍适用的生物标志物，通过绘制大脑发育随时间的变化来评估规范性发展。为了解决这个问题，在印度北方邦的一家医院纵向获取了一组婴儿和幼儿的结构MRI数据，然后在5岁时进行了随访。北方邦是印度人口最多的邦，拥有超过2亿人口，其中80%的人口生活在农村地区（https://censusindia.gov.in/）。北方邦的孕产妇和儿童健康状况是印度最差的（Vora等人，2009年）。重男轻女深深植根于印度文化和社会的父权结构。最终导致杀害女婴、系统性偏见、忽视和遗弃女婴（Guilmoto et al., 2018）。对发育中的大脑进行纵向成像的方法使我们能够生成大脑发育的规范模型，并从这一轨迹中识别偏差，以调查风险和恢复力因素，监测发育途径并确定有效干预的窗口。北方邦的队列可以作为一个案例研究来调查城市化和文化性别偏见对大脑发育的影响，通过比较英国和美国婴儿队列的大脑结构发育的不同特征。

A third of young children in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) fail to reach basic milestones in their cognitive or socioemotional development (McCoy, 2016). From conception, the developing brain increasingly specialises in response to the infant's environment. Exposure to adversity in the environment during this time may permanently affect developmental trajectories and ultimately result in cognitive deficits and neurological disorders later on in life. Neonatal neuroimaging can be used as an intermediate phenotype to demonstrate the effect of genetic, environmental and prenatal influences on the developing brain (Jha et al., 2018). There are many challenges involved using neuroimaging techniques in low resource settings and behavioural batteries have cultural biases because they were developed for high resource contexts. As a result, there is a very limited representation of LMICs in developmental neuroimaging or neurocognitive studies, despite the fact that 90% of young people (10-24 years old) live in developing countries (United Nations Development Report 2016). Structural MRI (Elwell, C 2020) has the potential to provide objective, universally-applicable biomarkers to assess normative development, by charting brain development over time. To address this, structural MRI data has been acquired longitudinally in a cohort of infants and toddlers at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India, then followed up at 5 years old. Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India with over 200 million people and 80% of this population live in rural areas (https://censusindia.gov.in/). The maternal and child health outcomes in Uttar Pradesh are some of the worst in India (Vora et al., 2009). Male child preference is deeply rooted in the patriarchal structure of Indian culture and society. It has culminated in female infanticide, systemic bias, neglect and abandonment of female children (Guilmoto et al., 2018). A longitudinal approach to imaging the developing brain allows us to generate normative models of brain development and identify deviants from this trajectory to investigate risk and resilience factors, monitor developmental pathways and identify windows for effective intervention. The Uttar Pradesh cohort can be used as a case study to investigate the effects of urbanicity and cultural gender bias on brain development, by comparing different features of structural brain growth with cohorts of infants in the UK and USA.