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

在世界各地，新冠肺炎疫情已经对日常生活产生了深刻的颠覆性影响。对于处于发育脆弱时期的儿童，如青春期，限制对其身心健康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。具体地说，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的影响的迫切需要，该项目将使用尖端分析工具来利用青少年大脑认知发展(ABCD)研究中的大样本青少年的多模式数据。这项工作的首要目标是系统地量化大流行对大脑网络的影响，这些网络在认知方面发挥着基础性作用，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，目标是量化新冠肺炎大流行的多方面不利影响对神经回路(连接体)的调制。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数据，并将比较发达和成熟网络的拓扑属性与认知和心理健康结果。大规模模拟将根据受扰的连接来预测结果的变化。疫情爆发后收集的神经成像数据将用于验证这些预测。该项目的发现可能会对发展神经回路对大规模事件(如全球大流行)的韧性和脆弱性提供变革性的见解。这些发现可以被用来开发有效的干预措施，以最大限度地减少/防止对儿童认知结果的有害长期影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.