Early Adversity and Drug Use Vulnerability Among Low Income Rural Children: Testing a Neuro-ecological Model of Resilience

项目摘要 更广泛的社区环境对儿童神经认知发育的影响及其发病风险 下游药物滥用现象严重。这项提案的重点是居住在农村的低收入儿童 乔治亚。在南方农村贫穷对家庭来说尤其具有挑战性。新出现的研究表明 农村和城市的贫困具有不同的风险和保护因素，对 儿童的神经和社会情绪发展。这些差异突显了独特的背景风险 以及影响农村青年吸毒脆弱性发展的保护因素。消息来源： 从生态发育神经科学的角度来看，我们声称易损性的神经标记物不能 从儿童对其生态环境的体验中孤立地理解。这项拟议的研究是 第一个将神经评估与环境应激源的多维评估相结合 在农村社区的保护过程中，并从7岁开始跟踪儿童在敏感的 生命过程的发育期--对药物使用脆弱性的持续影响。 我们的核心前提假设认知控制系统(认知控制网络[CCN])的效率 在调节社会情绪系统(情绪、奖励和显著网络[ERSN])时， 将农村儿童暴露在逆境中与他们使用毒品的脆弱性联系起来。我们认为多维的 逆境的性质，并具体说明与威胁、剥夺和 不可预测性。然而，在将逆境与吸毒联系起来的途径上，存在着相当大的个体差异。 脆弱性，是儿童暴露在家庭、同伴、学校和社区保护过程中的产物。 我们建议招募265名低收入农村儿童(7岁)和他们的主要照顾者到未来的 队列研究(跟踪7岁至10岁的儿童)。儿童将参与功能磁共振扫描以评估CCN ERSN的调制。为了评估暴露在逆境和社会生态保护因素中，我们将 获取丰富的多层次信息，可用于测试以下目标：1)童年的影响 逆境对神经风险机制的影响；2)逆境通过神经间接影响药物使用的脆弱性 风险机制，以及3)家庭、同伴、学校和社区保护因素对 儿童逆境与神经风险之间的联系以及神经风险与药物使用脆弱性之间的联系。 有效连接农村环境、神经成像和行为数据的多层次研究对于 提高针对这一人群的药物使用弹性发展模型的精确度和特异性。

Project Summary The influence of broader community contexts on children’s neurocognitive development and risk for downstream drug misuse is significant. The focus of this proposal is on low-income children who reside in rural Georgia. Being poor in the rural South is particularly challenging for families. Emerging research suggests that rural vs. urban poverty is characterized by distinct risk and protective factors that have unique effects on children’s neural and socioemotional development. These differences underscore the unique contextual risk and protective factors that affect the development of drug use vulnerability among rural youth. Informed by an ecological developmental neuroscience perspective, we purport that neural markers of vulnerability cannot be understood in isolation from children’s experience of their ecological contexts. The proposed study is among the first to integrate neural assessments with multidimensional assessments of environmental stressors and protective processes in rural communities and begins following children at age 7 during a sensitive developmental period for life-course-persistent effects on drug use vulnerability. Our core premise posits that the efficiency of cognitive control systems (cognitive control networks [CCN]) in modulating socioemotional systems (emotion, reward, and salience networks [ERSN]) is a mechanism linking rural children’s exposure to adversity to their drug use vulnerabilities. We consider the multidimensional nature of adversity and specify environmental experiences associated with threat, deprivation, and unpredictability. However, considerable individual differences exist in the pathway linking adversity to drug use vulnerability, a product of children’s exposure to family, peer, school, and community protective processes. We propose to recruit 265 low-income, rural children (age 7) and their primary caregivers into a prospective cohort study (following children from ages 7 to 10). Children will participate in fMRI scans to assess CCN modulation of the ERSN. To assess exposure to adversity and social-ecological protective factors, we will obtain rich multi-level information that can be used to test the following aims: 1) the influence of childhood adversity on neural risk mechanisms, 2) the indirect influence of adversity on drug use vulnerability via neural risk mechanisms, and 3) the moderating influence of family, peer, school, and community protective factors on the links between childhood adversity neural risk as well as between neural risk and drug use vulnerabilities. Multi-level research that effectively connects rural contexts, neuroimaging, and behavioral data is critical for advancing the precision and specificity of developmental models of drug use resilience for this population.