Hi everyone, I am Rachel Stephen and from Belle Mead, NJ. I am going into 10th grade, and always have had a passion for Psychology and Cognitive Science with more emphasis in Learning and Memory and Decision Making Neuroscience. I have started a blog and channel called livestudyhacks in which my mission is to help middle school students to learn faster by improving their mindset, self esteem, and implementing new study skills that reduce their stress and anxiety. So that is a quick introduction about me!
So today as the teen ambassador of the ABCD study, I would like to tell you a story of Liz Murray. Liz Murray had it rough, her mother had died of AIDs and her father was on the streets. They both did drugs, and Liz Murray was homeless at age 15 because all the money and possessions were going to spend on these drugs. However after her mother’s death, Liz made a vow to herself that after her mothers death that her life would be different. Liz did not want to end up like her mom, so what she did was she picked herself back up and decided to start studying for school.
With her ambition, she became the class topper and went on a trip with her high school to Harvard. Liz told herself it is possible to get into this school, and worked hard, applied for a competitive New York times scholarship and got it. She now finished Harvard, and wrote a book of her life and there is a film after her called Homeless to harvard.
So why did I bring this story up, Liz was an expectation, in the film we see that there were many setbacks and challenges that Liz had to go through at one point her closest friend told her to stop trying.These adolescent teenagers from these disadvantaged neighborhoods, they do not know what is expected from them. So this leads us to the question on How does lower neighborhood quality affect adolescent brain development?
To answer this question I looked into 3 papers into the ABCD
- Resting-State Functional Connectivity (rsFC)
- Neurocognitive performance and brain structure
- Child Reward Neurocircuitry
- What is the ABCD study
- Large and longitudinal
- 11,878 children (NIH funded)
- Advantage in the ABCD study (Open science Model)
- Disadvantage (Retention)
RsFC
- Positive environments are closely linked to cognitive development among adolescents.
- This has been proved through the investigation of underprivileged neighborhoods and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFc).
- The procedure of this preregistered study, having had a sample of 7618 children(aged 9-10 years old), was to primarily examine whether family and school environmental factors impact disadvantaged neighborhoods.
- The rsFc results of disadvantage were more associated with widespread alterations FC across higher-order.
- The weakness correlated to rsFC was generally related to worse cognition,mental health, and behavior.
Neurocognitive performance and brain structure
- Experimentation includes whether these neurocognitive performance and brain structure associations are pervasive or limited. It is varying across metropolitan areas and attributes to local variations.
- The study looked at 8,598 children during their baseline visit between October 1,2016-October 31, 2017, measuring neurocognition with the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery and T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging.
- The resulting linear mixed-effects models examined the association between neighborhood disadvantage and outcomes after adjusting for sociodemographic factors.
- This study found that local variation in neighborhood disadvantage was associated with lower neurocognitive performance, lower total cortical surface area, and subcortical volume.
Reward Neurocircuitry
- Youth who grew up in Low socioeconomic status(SES) often face tonic adversity related to a diminished ability to experience pleasure. As a result, there is a diminished neural response to positive stimuli in regions associated with positive experience and reward.
- However, ABCD has proven the opposite that adolescents do have reward activation. Youth with a parental history of alcohol abuse have more activation in their right Nacc(nucleus accumbens) and those with a parental history with drugs have activation in their putamen located in the Basal ganglia.
- The reward system continues into two vital pathways: the mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine pathways.
- The mesolimbic path is between the nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area(VTA). Another powerful system is the mesocortical dopamine pathway; this pathway indicates how the VTA activation causes activity in the frontal cortex.
Conclusion
- These emerging ABCD studies regarding rsFC, brain structure, and reward neurocircuitry depict the influence of environmental factors on the lower neighborhood adolescent community.
- In essence, a more enriching and stimulating home environment allows healthy brain development.
- Improving favorable conditions can bolster the mesocortical and mesolimbic learning systems.
- These findings portray how lower neighborhood qualities are an environmental risk factor for neurodevelopment and population health; these works further highlight the importance of a positive family and school environment.