Effects of poverty on affective development: A multi-level, longitudinal study

描述(由申请者提供)：美国五分之一的儿童在贫困中长大。这些儿童面临着患精神病的高风险，这种疾病通常持续一生，并使低社会经济地位永久化。因此，贫困及其后遗症是一个重大的公共卫生问题。贫困儿童往往承受更大的慢性压力，这可能会改变大脑和下丘脑-垂体-肾上腺(HPA)轴功能，使贫困成为生物学上的根深蒂固的问题。通过调查青少年成长过程中与贫困相关的压力源，本研究将阐述RDoC应对RFA-MH-14-050的持续威胁结构。人们对贫困如何影响潜在的生物机制并引发焦虑和抑郁等症状知之甚少。这种知识的缺乏阻碍了制定干预措施的努力，这些干预措施针对的是将贫困与精神病联系起来的机制。我们的目标是更好地了解贫困如何在发展过程中影响生物学并导致精神病态。中心假设是，贫困会增加四种类型的压力源(暴露于危险、家庭冲突、居住不稳定、忽视)的发生，从而导致HPA轴失调，杏仁核激活，以及从腹内侧额前皮质到杏仁核的调节连接不够成熟；长期暴露于与贫困相关的压力源会导致HPA轴和杏仁核长时间处于过度活跃状态，导致系统性转向将神经和认知资源更多地分配给负面事件和更负面的影响，包括焦虑和抑郁症状，根据自我和父母的报告。青少年将从脆弱家庭和儿童福祉研究(FFCWS)中进行评估，该研究正在进行中，研究对象是主要来自低收入家庭的儿童。FFCWS的特征是：1)儿童在出生时、1岁、3岁、5岁和9岁时进行评估，并将在15岁时进行评估；2)样本代表在他们所在城市出生的儿童，因此，与几乎所有其他脑成像研究不同，研究结果具有普遍性；3)尽管样本包含高水平的贫困，但可以进行比较的全范围收入代表；以及4)青年现在正进入青春期中期--这是精神病理学的高风险时期。当受试者15岁时，情感功能将在四个分析水平上进行评估：1)大脑(使用功能磁共振来评估对情绪面孔的反应的激活和连通性，并使用扩散张量成像来测量结构连通性)；2)HPA轴(通过测量对应激源和DHEA的皮质醇)；3)行为(使用注意力偏差测量)；以及4)自我和父母报告的负面情绪测量，并在17岁时进行跟踪。FFCWS的发展史(经济状况、症状、育儿)将在这四个分析水平上映射到情感功能上。通过利用FFCWS，该团队处于有利地位，可以进行将童年经验与神经生物学和心理学数据相结合的研究，以更好地阐明通往精神病理学的主要途径。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One in five children in the US grows up in poverty. These children face high risk for psychopathology, which often lasts a lifetime and perpetuates low socioeconomic status. Thus, poverty and its sequelae represent a major public health problem. Poor children often experience greater chronic stress, which may allow poverty to become biologically embedded by altering brain and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function. By examining teens growing up with poverty-related stressors, the study will explicate the RDoC Sustained Threat Construct in response to RFA-MH-14-050. Little is known about how poverty impacts underlying biological mechanisms and gives rise to symptoms, such as anxiety and depression. This lack of knowledge hinders efforts to develop interventions targeting mechanisms linking poverty and psychopathology. Our objective is to better understand how poverty affects biology during development and leads to psychopathology. The central hypothesis is that poverty increases the occurrence of four types of stressors (exposure to danger, family conflict, residential instability, neglect), which leads to HPA axis dysregulatio, increased amygdala activation and less mature regulatory connections from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to the amygdala; extended exposure to poverty-related stressors leads to a protracted period when the HPA axis and amygdala are hyper- active, resulting in a systemic shift toward greater allocation of neural and cognitive resources to negative events and more negative affect, including anxiety and depression symptoms, as measured with self- and parental-reports. Teens will be assessed from The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), an ongoing study of children born to predominantly low-income families. Attributes of the FFCWS are: 1) children were assessed at birth, 1, 3, 5 and 9 years and will be assessed at 15; 2) the sample is representative of children born in their city and, thus, unlike almost all othr brain imaging research, findings are generalizable; 3) Although the sample contains high levels of poverty, a full range of incomes are represented allowing for comparisons; and 4) Youth are now entering mid-adolescence - a period of heightened risk for psychopathology. When subjects are 15, affective function will be assessed at four levels of analysis: 1) brain (with functional MRI to assess activation and connectivity in response to emotional faces and with diffusion tensor imaging to measure structural connectivity); 2) HPA axis (by measuring cortisol in response to a stressor and DHEA); 3) behavior (using an attention bias measure); and 4) self- and parent-report measures of negative affect with follow-up at age 17. Developmental history from FFCWS (economic conditions, symptoms, parenting) will be mapped onto affective function at these four levels of analysis. By leveraging the FFCWS, the team is well positioned to conduct research that integrates experience across childhood with neurobiological and psychological data to better elucidate a major path to psychopathology.