Poster No:
1538
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Seda Sacu1, Tobias Banaschewski1, Martin Gerchen2, Nathalie Holz1
Institutions:
1Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany, 2Department of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany
First Author:
Seda Sacu
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health
Mannheim, Germany
Co-Author(s):
Tobias Banaschewski
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health
Mannheim, Germany
Martin Gerchen
Department of Clinical Psychology, Central Institute of Mental Health
Mannheim, Germany
Nathalie Holz
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Central Institute of Mental Health
Mannheim, Germany
Introduction:
Early life stress (ELS) alters brain development and increases the risk of developing psychopathology later in life. Previous literature suggested that ELS is associated with alterations in brain function and connectivity during emotion processing, especially in the fronto-limbic pathway [VanTieghem and Tottenham, 2018]. However, most of the previous connectivity studies were limited to a small set of priori-selected regions of interest. Recent findings suggest the involvement of several large-scale brain networks in emotion processing and regulation beyond the fronto-limbic pathway [Morawetz et al., 2020]. Thus, investigating whole-brain connectivity via large-scale brain networks rather than a small set of regions of interest can bring new insights into the neural embedding of ELS. However, this approach requires a selection of a brain parcellation map, which could further introduce heterogeneity [Hallquist and Hillary, 2018] and affect the interpretation of results [Bryce et al., 2021].
Methods:
Using data from a longitudinal birth cohort study (n=161, 87 females), we investigated the associations between stressful life events and task-based whole-brain functional connectivity by taking into account parcellation map choice. All participants completed an fMRI-based emotion regulation task at the age of 33 years. We measured stressful life events using a modified version of the Munich Event List [Maier-Diewald et al., 1983] from prenatal period to 19 years via seven assessment waves. Whole-brain functional connectivity was calculated for the emotion regulation contrast (i.e., regulate negative > look negative) using the whole-brain generalized psychophysiological interactions [Gerchen et al., 2014] using three commonly used brain parcellation maps: Automated Anatomical Labeling [Rolls et al., 2020], Brainnetome [Fan et al., 2016], and Schaefer Atlas [Schaefer et al., 2018]. The association between life stress and connectivity was investigated within the multiple regression framework with and without network-based statistics [Zalesky et al., 2010] correction for multiple comparisons.
Results:
Our results showed that ELS (i.e., stress during infancy and childhood) was mainly associated with lower connectivity during emotion regulation between frontal, temporal and subcortical brain regions covering dorsal attention, frontoparietal, and limbic networks. Those alterations were identifiable across all parcellation maps. However, each parcellation map was also related to distinct alterations that could be explained by their specific features (e.g., more elaborate parcellation of some brain regions). In addition, applying a correction for multiple comparisons affected the extent of shared and distinct connection patterns. We did not find a significant association between life stress that occurred during adolescence and whole-brain functional connectivity during emotion regulation.
Conclusions:
Our results showed that ELS is related to the connectivity alterations between attention and limbic networks, which take part in emotion processing and regulation. We identified these ELS-related alterations across different parcellation schemes, however, similarities were more pronounced before the correction for multiple comparisons. These results suggest that using different parcellation schemes and reporting shared and distinct patterns could help to alleviate the heterogeneity induced by parcellation map choice and increase the generalizability of the findings.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Emotion and Motivation Other 2
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Connectivity (eg. functional, effective, structural) 1
Keywords:
Development
Emotions
FUNCTIONAL MRI
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
Bryce N V., Flournoy JC, Guassi Moreira JF, Rosen ML, Sambook KA, Mair P, McLaughlin KA (2021): Brain parcellation selection: An overlooked decision point with meaningful effects on individual differences in resting-state functional connectivity. Neuroimage 243.
Fan L, Li H, Zhuo J, Zhang Y, Wang J, Chen L, Yang Z, Chu C, Xie S, Laird AR, Fox PT, Eickhoff SB, Yu C, Jiang T (2016): The Human Brainnetome Atlas: A New Brain Atlas Based on Connectional Architecture. Cereb Cortex 26.
Gerchen MF, Bernal-Casas D, Kirsch P (2014): Analyzing task-dependent brain network changes by whole-brain psychophysiological interactions: A comparison to conventional analysis. Hum Brain Mapp 35:5071–5082.
Hallquist MN, Hillary FG (2018): Graph theory approaches to functional network organization in brain disorders: A critique for a brave new small-world. Netw Neurosci 3.
Maier-Diewald W, Wittchen H-U, Hecht H, Werner-Eilert K (1983): Die Münchner Ereignisliste (MEL) - Anwendungsmanual. München.
Morawetz C, Riedel MC, Salo T, Berboth S, Eickhoff SB, Laird AR, Kohn N (2020): Multiple large-scale neural networks underlying emotion regulation. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. Elsevier Ltd.
Rolls ET, Huang CC, Lin CP, Feng J, Joliot M (2020): Automated anatomical labelling atlas 3. Neuroimage 206.
Schaefer A, Kong R, Gordon EM, Laumann TO, Zuo X-N, Holmes AJ, Eickhoff SB, Yeo BTT (2018): Local-Global Parcellation of the Human Cerebral Cortex from Intrinsic Functional Connectivity MRI. Cereb Cortex 28.
VanTieghem MR, Tottenham N (2018): Neurobiological programming of early life stress: Functional development of amygdala-prefrontal circuitry and vulnerability for stress-related psychopathology. In: . Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences. Springer Verlag. Vol. 38, pp 117–136.
Zalesky A, Fornito A, Bullmore ET (2010): Network-based statistic: Identifying differences in brain networks. Neuroimage 53.