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

描述（由申请人提供）：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疾病的高风险，这种疾病往往会持续一生，并使社会经济地位长期低下。因此，贫穷及其后遗症是一个重大的公共卫生问题。贫困儿童经常经历更大的慢性压力，这可能会通过改变大脑和下丘脑-垂体-肾上腺（HPA）轴的功能，使贫困成为生物学上的烙印。本研究通过调查在贫困相关压力源下成长的青少年，阐明RDoC持续威胁结构对RFA-MH-14-050的响应。关于贫穷如何影响潜在的生物机制并引起诸如焦虑和抑郁等症状，人们知之甚少。这种知识的缺乏阻碍了制定针对贫困和精神病理联系机制的干预措施的努力。我们的目标是更好地了解贫困如何影响发育过程中的生物学并导致精神病理学。核心假设是，贫困增加了四种类型的压力源（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、杏仁核激活增加和腹内侧前额叶皮层到杏仁核的调节连接不成熟；长期暴露于与贫困相关的压力源会导致下丘脑轴和杏仁核过度活跃的时间延长，导致神经和认知资源的系统性转变，更多地分配给负面事件和更多的负面影响，包括焦虑和抑郁症状，这可以通过自我和父母的报告来衡量。青少年将从脆弱家庭和儿童福利研究（FFCWS）中进行评估，这是一项正在进行的研究，主要针对低收入家庭出生的儿童。FFCWS的属性是：1)儿童在出生、1、3、5和9岁时进行评估，并将在15岁时进行评估；2)样本是他们所在城市出生的儿童的代表，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)虽然样本中包含了高水平的贫困，但它代表了所有的收入范围，以便进行比较；4)年轻人正在进入青春期中期，这是精神病理的高风险时期。当受试者15岁时，情感功能将在四个分析层面进行评估：1)大脑（用功能性MRI评估对情绪面孔的反应的激活和连通性，用弥散张量成像测量结构连通性）；2) HPA轴（通过测量皮质醇对应激源和脱氢表雄酮的反应）；3)行为（使用注意偏差测量）；4)自我和父母报告的负面情绪测量，并在17岁随访。FFCWS的发展历史（经济条件、症状、养育）将在这四个分析层次上映射到情感功能上。通过利用FFCWS，该团队能够很好地开展研究，将儿童时期的经验与神经生物学和心理学数据相结合，以更好地阐明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.