486 matches found for How People Learn Brain,Mind,Experience,and School Expanded Edition. in 7 Brain Health Across the Life Span
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...7Brain Health Across the Life Span
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...Standardized psychiatric interviews include hundreds of questions about symptoms, but most psychiatric imaging studies take a very reduced look at these ...
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... records are already capturing important biologically based measures that could be easily scaled—through mobile platforms or otherwise—and then linked to meaningful health outcomes. Currently, differential treatment response to measures of brain health is a major gap in the literature ...
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...There is a range of commonsense good practices that can improve brain health, such as exercise and sleep. However,
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...this does not imply that these practices will prevent the occurrence of Alzheimer’s disease or other brain disorders with underlying genetic factors. (Deanna Barch)
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...There is evidence that individuals with a history of early life adversity may be differentially responsive to treatments for depression and other mental disorders, but clinics do not typically ask about those factors. There may be value in collecting such data to examine implications for ... and treatment interventions addressing a range of cognitive and emotional disorders. (Lis Nielsen)
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... of early-life stress on neurodevelopment. Ted Satterthwaite, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, examined how the integration of complex and personalized data can be used to understand normal and abnormal brain network development. ...
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...EARLY ADVERSITY, EMOTIONAL PROCESSING, AND THE NEURAL BASES OF PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS
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..., how early in the process of brain development they have an effect. Many of the factors that appear to be critical seem to be emerging earlier and earlier, she
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... at specific developmental stages—such as lack of parental support early in life—might be most detrimental to brain health (Gabard-Durnam and McLaughlin, 2019). Similarly, the presence of input that should not be happening at a given time, owing to various types of adversity, may also be ... damaging at certain periods of life. This likely interacts with what is happening in the brain during these periods. Myelination and experience-dependent processes, such as pruning,1 can vary by brain region. This suggests that there is developmental specificity to the effects of ... and nurturance on mental health; these effects vary by region and may be differently susceptible at various points in development. Understanding these differences can guide decisions about when to intervene for optimal success....
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... Maternal Support and Brain Development...
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... Barch focused on maternal support and brain development, with the caveat that paternal support is also important, but good quality measures of paternal support are very limited. A rich ... of literature from rodent and nonhuman primate studies clearly demonstrates that the presence of a nurturing caregiver early in life has a powerful effect on hippocampal ... and function. This occurs through epigenetic mechanisms that are modulated by various aspects of early caregiving (Fish et al., 2004; Liu et al., 1997; ...
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... (Bremner et al., 1997; Driessen et al., 2000; Stein et al., 1997). The hippocampus is a structure that is dense with glucocorticoid receptors and is important in stress regulation and stress modulation through its integral role in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis stress ... . It has been suggested that reductions and disruptions to hippocampal volume and function lead to maladaptive stress reactivity later in life, which makes it more difficult for a child to engage in appropriate emotion...
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... regulation and coping. Later in life, this can contribute to affective psychopathologies such as depression and anxiety (Luby et al., 2016)....
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... Effect of Preschool Maternal Support on the Trajectory of Hippocampal Volume...
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... is either more or less important. To explore this question, Barch described a long-term longitudinal study that recruited a sample of around 300 preschoolers between the ages of 3 and 5 years that began in 2002 and is still going on today (Luby et al., 2016). Each year, the participants receive ...
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... across multiple waves, while controlling for factors such as whole-brain gray matter. The investigators also looked at whether the measures of preschool maternal support and school-age maternal support have main effects (i.e., overall hippocampal volume) or interactions over time. The latter are ... with changes in hippocampal volume over time as children grow. In the preschool age range, they found an upward slope typical of hippocampal volume development in the growth period. The only effect that holds is that of preschool ... support on the slope of hippocampal volume, which positively predicts children’s self-report management of sad emotions. The greater the preschool maternal support, the steeper the increase in hippocampal volume development over time (see Figure 7-1). This suggests that preschool is a sensitive ...
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... The findings for the longitudinal preschool study are consistent with the animal literature suggesting that early maternal support has a positive effect on hippocampal structure and function.2 ...
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... 2 Barch noted that animal models typically do not measure hippocampal volume; they tend to measure more molecular and cellular processes related to hippocampal development—so the human and animal study results do not mirror each other exactly, but they are ...
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...FIGURE 7-1 Individually estimated slopes over time for total hippocampus volume as a function of preschool maternal support.NOTE: MLM = multilevel linear model.SOURCES: As presented by Deanna Barch at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on ...
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... hippocampal volume reported being the most effective at managing their negative emotions. This relationship was supported by both the self-reported and the parent-reported measures of emotion regulation. Steeper hippocampal volume growth was also associated with better episodic memory function in ...
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...Adverse Childhood Experiences and Interactions with Maternal Support
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... be affected by parental psychopathology, also producing an ACE. However, other ACEs are relatively independent of parental behavior, such as poverty and exposure to trauma not perpetrated by parents. Research on the effect
...
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... of ACEs on child development has generated good data that early childhood adversity also relates to the structural and functional development of limbic regions including the hippocampus, the amygdala, the basal ganglia, and cortical regions (Carrión et al., 2010; ...
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... More information is needed on the potentially interactive effects of early childhood adversity and caregiver support, as well as the developmental timing in which these two things have their strongest relationships to brain outcomes. Some evidence ... to a resilience factor, but it could also be the result of the additive contributions that maternal support provides to a child’s brain health and development.3...
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... analyzed data from a longitudinal study to look for independent or interactive effects of maternal support and ACEs on brain development in preschool- and school-aged children. In this study, they looked at the hippocampus but also looked more broadly at various subcortical and cortical brain ... parental psychiatric disorders).5 The neuroimaging data were used to estimate the trajectories of hippocampal, amygdala, and caudate volume by preschool-age ACEs and school-age maternal support. This revealed interesting interactions between maternal support and ACEs, with some differential effects on ...
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... The estimated trajectories of hippocampal volume by preschool ACEs and school-age maternal support show that those two factors interact. For...
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... 3 Barch, D. Workshop presentation—Early Adversity, Emotional Processing, and the Neural Bases of Psychiatric Illness. Available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Activities/Aging/BrainHealthAcrossTheLifeSpanWorkshop/2019-...
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... school-age children with low maternal support (i.e., one standardization below the mean), no particularly strong differential effect of high versus low ... ACEs was observed. However, participants with mean school-age maternal support have some differentiation, with children with lower preschool ACEs having a steeper increase in hippocampal volume than children with higher preschool ACEs. At one standard deviation above the mean—the ... school-age maternal support—there is greater differentiation among the effects of preschool ACEs. This is not a buffering pattern, Barch said. In a buffering pattern, high maternal support would see little effect of preschool ACEs—the ... strong for children with low maternal support. Instead, these results suggest that optimal brain health requires both factors to be present: low preschool ACEs as well as strong maternal support that continues at least into school age....
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... Estimated trajectories of amygdala volume by preschool ACEs and school-age maternal support show a pattern that is somewhat similar. In participants with the lowest maternal support, there was some differentiation among ... high ACEs that becomes stronger in participants with greater maternal support. The strongest differentiation was seen in participants with high school-age maternal support. The largest amygdala volumes were associated with low preschool ACEs and high school-age maternal support, suggesting that both ...
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... Not every brain region shows the same effect, however. Estimated trajectories of caudate volume by preschool ACEs and preschool maternal support show a different pattern. Participants with many ACEs start out with a smaller caudate volume, but regardless of the number of ACEs ... between low and high ACEs are present from very early on but do not change over time. Independent of that effect, there was a main effect of preschool maternal support showing a similar pattern. That is, participants with low preschool maternal support start low, but do not show a difference in ... compared to participants with high preschool maternal support. This phenomenon is different in the hippocampus and the amygdala, regions in which the effects of ACEs and maternal support ...
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... Barch turned to the timing with which children develop mental health problems and the relationship that has to brain development. Mental health issues can arise anywhere across the life span—children as young as 3 years of ... can have clinical depression and anxiety. Some evidence...
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... problems. Potentially, this could be a type of experience-dependent learning. Living with depression colors a child’s developmental experiences and may change the types of learning experiences they have (Gabard-Durnam and McLaughlin, 2019). However, the timing of the onset of depression may also ... interacting with various phases of brain development. Different brain areas, functions, and processes mature at different time points, which may also interact with when a child is experiencing depression....
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... Barch and colleagues explored these questions using data from the longitudinal study, which included measures of depression from school age to late adolescence.6 Evidence shows that depression is associated with disruptions in reward processing—in reward anticipation and, in ...
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...) to see if it was related to a child’s current depression versus cumulative level of depression. Then they separated out depression at preschool, school age, and later adolescence to look at differential effects. The only relationship seen with current depression was activity in the nucleus ...
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... Depression during the preschool period shows a broad effect in the caudate, the putamen, and the dorsal and the rostral anterior cingulate, but...
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... 6 Barch, D. Workshop presentation—Early Adversity, Emotional Processing, and the Neural Bases of Psychiatric Illness. Available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Activities/Aging/BrainHealthAcrossTheLifeSpanWorkshop/2019-...
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...no effect with the nucleus accumbens. Depression in school-age children shows an effect that is less broad, while adolescent depression was associated with the nucleus accumbens. The same pattern of effects ... observed when all three age ranges are included, indicating that these are the differential effects of preschool, school age, and adolescent depression. This suggests that earlier-onset depression is associated with broader effects in the cortical limbic circuit, even ...
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... was associated with hyporeactivity of the ventral striatum to anticipation of reward. If such an association between current depressed mood state and ventral striatal hyporeactivity to reward anticipation is present across development, then repeated experience of depression that starts early in ... of a broader cortico-striatal circuit. An early onset of depression may disrupt this network as the child is developing, with a cascading and broad effect.
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...Brain Health and Resilience
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...Early environmental and emotional experiences relate to brain development in ways that are consistent with both experience-expectant and experience-dependent processes. In addition to considering how to measure brain health or resilience, researchers should consider how to measure the ... that promote brain health and resilience. Figure 7-2 is a simplistic model of how violations of experience-expectant input at specific developmental stages, in conjunction with ... -occurring mental health challenges (which are not unrelated), can contribute to disrupted development of limbic and cortical regions. These regions are associated with subsequent poor emotion regulation and stress responsivity, which may contribute to mental health ... physical health challenges in adolescence and adulthood.
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...FIGURE 7-2 Model of disrupted development of limbic and cortical regions.NOTE: ACE = adverse childhood experience.SOURCE: As presented by Deanna Barch at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on ...
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... it looks like a negative slope, but it is not a particularly strong effect. The stronger effect is driven by the positive slope of having low ACEs and high maternal support. This was not exactly the pattern Barch’s group predicted. They expected to see more of a buffering effect (i.e., very ...
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... at Columbia University, presented on the impact of early-life stress on neurodevelopment. Brain health is age dependent, context dependent, and age appropriate with respect to plasticity and to the tendency or the ability to coordinate with parental cues at age-appropriate times. Humans have ... long developmental period for brain development, so it is necessary to pay attention to and support families to improve the brain health of children. Childhood adversity is a leading cause of adult mental health problems, contributing to ... can experience. The large corpus of basic neuroscientific evidence from animal models shows that brain regions such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex—which make up the fundamental circuits underlying emotion regulation processes—are highly susceptible to the effects of ... in adulthood and even more so in early life. This is due in part to the rapid growth and potential sensitive periods during this phase of life; it is also due in part to the large extent to which development depends on input from a highly ... outside world (Liston et al., 2006; Magarinos and McEwen, 1995; Mitra et al., 2005; Vyas et al., 2002)....
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... also influence the way a child’s brain learns as well as the way the brain constructs itself over time (Tottenham, 2012). Typical children and adolescents have a very robust amygdala response to emotional stimuli early in life. This tends to happen in the absence of the more mature ... among amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus that are seen later in adolescence and adulthood. This points to an early period when the nature of the neurobiology may be such that it is highly amenable to influences like individual ... in caregiving (Gabard-Durnam et al., 2014, 2016; Gee et al., 2013b; Silvers et al., 2016; Tottenham and Galván, 2016)....
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... Parental Buffering of Aversive Learning in Rats and Humans...
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... Data from rodent pups show that a parent’s regulated presence buffers amygdala activity and aversive learning. During a certain period in postnatal life, the functioning of the amygdala is dependent on the presence or absence of a regulated ... Those processes reverse when the mother is outside of the nest: the same-aged pup’s amygdala will now be engaged during fear learning (Moriceau and Sullivan, 2006). That plays out behaviorally in an important way, as demonstrated by placing a peppermint odor that has been paired with a foot shock ...
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... To investigate whether the type of effect on learning observed in the rats is similarly present humans, a study was conducted with preschool-aged children (Tottenham et al., 2019). The children were presented with...
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... during the acquisition phase. After acquisition, the children were placed without their parents into a human Y maze with the triangle on one door and the square on the other in order to look for a behavioral tendency to approach one door over the other....
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... Children who had been conditioned alone without a parent were more likely than not to avoid the square door, indicating avoidance learning. However, children who had been conditioned in the presence of a parent were more likely than not to show a preference for the square door, which ... similar to the behavior seen in the rat pups. This was a within-subjects design, so the same children’s learning seemed to be affected by the parent. No effect was seen during acquisition, suggesting that the parent is not simply calming the child, but ... the nature of the learning that occurs. Variability across children is partially explained by cortisol levels, Tottenham added. Children with higher levels of cortisol ... were less likely to show this effect of the parent, suggesting some sort of biological constraints on this type of learning....
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... In a separate study, children were scanned while they looked at pictures of their parents relative to other people’s parents. Investigators found that pictures of parents during childhood were effective in dampening the activity of the amygdala (Gee et al., ...
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... Children can experience many types of maltreatment, but Tottenham focused on emotional neglect and/or rejection by the caregiver. Unlike the more obvious signs present in physical neglect or abuse, emotional neglect and rejection effects can be ... obvious and often overlooked. This is a pernicious form of maltreatment that is highly comorbid with other forms of maltreatment that children experience. The ... input early in life is not the same as the absence of a threat to the infant. It is a failure to receive needed parent–child intimacy, support, and serve–return dynamic, as well as being a significant stressor during brain development. When considering the role of stress during development, ...
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...;for example, whether the stress experience was limited to the infant period, childhood, adolescence, or whether the stress was chronic (Tottenham and Galván, 2016). Studying different stress chronotypes is valuable because they characterize the experience of many children who are subject to ...
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... Early Parental Deprivation and Amygdala Responsivity...
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... stress. In this case, they studied children who experienced early institutional care, which is an extreme form of caregiving neglect or deprivation, and were subsequently adopted into families that provided a very enriched caregiving environment. These children had a significant initial developmental ...
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... Tottenham presented data from children who were placed in institutional care at or near birth and then adopted by their second birthday (Tottenham et al., 2011). They found that previous institutional care is associated with elevated symptoms in ... . For instance, children with stronger amygdala signals to fear faces were also less likely to make eye contact as measured by eye-tracking measures and as measured by live dyadic interactions (Tottenham et al., 2011)....
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... Functional connectivity between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex reveals age-by-caregiving group interactions. Children with...
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...low-risk, no adversity backgrounds were likely to show a more childlike pattern of connectivity between amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Later, in adolescence, a more inhibitory pattern or anticorrelated relationship between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex is ... care, the connectivity pattern does not look like typically raised children. Instead, it more closely resembles the patterns seen in adolescents and in adults. Tottenham posited that strong amygdala reactivity early in life as a result of stress may actually instantiate earlier formation of these ... in developmental plasticity (see Figure 7-3). This may represent one means by which early-life stress is reducing neuroplasticity during childhood and adolescence.
...
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...It has been posited that these windows of plasticity—or sensitive periods—can be moved by different life experiences (Werker and Hensch, 2015). Caregiving adversity may shift some of these moments of plasticity or truncate them at earlier points within the circuits that have ... most affected by early-life adversity (Callaghan and Tottenham, 2016). Tottenham suggested that this may be happening through activity-based processes that have certain immediate benefits to the ...
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...-3 Amygdala hyperactivity reduces developmental plasticity.NOTE: mPFC = medial prefrontal cortex.SOURCE: As presented by Nim Tottenham at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on September 25, 2019.
...
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... indicates lower separation anxiety relative to their peers who did not show that change....
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... processes following early-life stress with this adaptation (Gee et al., 2013a). When the children were followed over 5 years, the children who showed the more adult-like pattern of connectivity were those who were likely to retain the higher anxiety phenotype over time. One hypothesis is that ... who showed the more childlike phenotypes through some transactional processes with parents may actually be invoking different caregiving behaviors that could ...
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... to parental cues. Unlike the typically raised rat pups that showed the bizarre preference learning in the presence of the parent, animals that had experienced early maltreatment did not show this buffering effect by the parent. Instead, they avoided the negative stimulus. This effect was mediated by the ...
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... longitudinally by splitting the postinstitutional care group into two subgroups: (1) those who showed lowering of the amygdala at time 1, and (2) those who did not, despite having comparable levels of anxiety at initial assessment. Over the 2-year period, those who showed the dampening of ...
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... Addressing Heterogeneity Among People Exposed to Adversity...
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... 7 Available at http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Activities/Aging/BrainHealthAcrossTheLifeSpanWorkshop/2019-JUN-26.aspx (accessed March 12, 2020)....
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... warrants investigation. Some of these differences might be viewed as potential developmental adaptations, some of which may work for the individuals and others against. The immediate goal is to better understand independent variables in studies of early-life stress, while also considering how ... needs develop and change with age. This heterogeneity is present within subgroupings of people who experienced early adversity, such as people who experienced domestic ... care and people who experienced international adoption with institutional care. This indicates that there may be specific experiences that transcend these ...
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... Her group’s current approach is to invite children who have experienced various types of caregiving experiences—both positive experiences and adversities—and, through data-driven processes, to cluster those children either on their brain behavior phenotypes or on their caregiving ... per se. Preliminary data are beginning to reveal some evidence of meaningful clusters, although there is still heterogeneity within the clusters and there are some factors that transcend these different boundaries....
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... INTEGRATING COMPLEX AND PERSONALIZED DATA TO UNDERSTAND NORMAL AND ABNORMAL BRAIN NETWORK DEVELOPMENT...
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... Satterthwaite described two studies that integrate complex and personalized measures of network development throughout youth and adolescence with a focus on brain health. He explained that the rationale for studying brain development is increasingly clear. Convergent lines of ... from animal models, human epidemiological studies, and translational studies suggest that most major neuropsychiatric conditions can be conceptualized as disorders of development. This domain of research ... to understand how the brain develops normally and then to understand how abnormal patterns of brain development are associated with different forms of psychopathology....
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... The ultimate goal of describing major mental illness in terms of abnormal trajectories of brain development is to allow for earlier diagnosis and intervention with more effective treatments in order to achieve improved functional outcomes for people living with these conditions. This work ... large-scale data that allow for sampling across multiple age ranges in both healthy and affected children. In his presentation, Satterthwaite presented neuroimaging data from a complex large-scale initiative called the Philadelphia ...
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... focuses on characterizing brain and behavior interaction with genetics. The cohort included 1,600 children aged 8–22 years, with a balanced mix of males and females and of ... and African Americans that reflects the local Philadelphia population (Satterthwaite et al., 2014)....
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... Network Modularity as a Key Measure of Brain Health...
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... Satterthwaite used selection neuroimaging data from the PNC to focus on structural and functional brain networks. Unlike neurological conditions in which there is a clear lesion and focality, psychiatric conditions are increasingly ... as connectopathies—that is, disorders of how the brain communicates. Brain networks can be measured both structurally and functionally. Structural brain networks can be reconstructed with diffusion imaging tractography techniques, while functional brain networks can be ...
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... modularity is a key measure (Satterthwaite et al., 2014). A network module is a collection of brain regions that are tightly connected to each other and weakly connected to other parts of the brain. These correspond to functional subsystems of the brain, as defined by conversion evidence from task ... , lesion studies, and animal studies. This modularity can be visualized using spring-embedded rendering to depict how the tightly connected brain regions are brought ... and the weakly connected brain regions are pushed apart, highlighting the network modules....
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... One of the most widely replicated findings in developmental cognitive neuroscience is that this modularity evolves dramatically throughout childhood and adolescence (Fair et al., 2007). Intramodular connections are much more likely to strengthen than weaken with age, which causes modules to become ... ’s group recently showed that structural brain networks undergo a similar process of modular segregation—modules become refined and prominent, with more connectivity within a module and less connectivity between modules. These modules are present but are relatively indistinct in ... specialized functions (Baum et al., 2017). However, this type of analysis only looks at simple, low-dimensional summary measures of network structure and...
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... function, which is just a single domain of cognition. A more clinically relevant approach would be to look across all clinical domains in psychiatry and simultaneously map these to abnormalities in the high-dimensional topology of the connectome....
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... Data Integration to Understand Abnormal Network Development...
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... challenge is that clinical diagnostic categories as codified in clinical practice are not clean biological classes, owing to vast heterogeneity and the frequency of comorbidities. In other words, they do not carve nature at the joints in a clear way. For example, depression is a large category ... is unlikely to represent a single biological phenomenon, given the amount of heterogeneity that has been demonstrated and the number of comorbidities that occur with the condition, such as anxiety....
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... The methodological challenge is that the data are highly dimensional. Typical case-control designs that ignore heterogeneity and comorbidity are often very hypothesis driven, thus they miss the opportunity to collect other rich data. Instead, this project takes a discovery ... approach using machine learning to define data-driven links between functional brain networks and psychiatric symptoms. He said that in essence, this “lets the brain teach us what the dimensions should be.” He explained that typical ... the entire brain; when this is taken to a connectivity matrix, connections between each of these nodes can create a common network with tens of thousands of edges (Xia et al., 2018). This is relatively high-dimensional data....
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... A problem that is just as substantial, but even more commonly ignored, is that clinical data also have reasonable dimensionality. Standardized psychiatric interviews include hundreds of questions about symptoms, but most psychiatric imaging studies take a very reduced look at these ... —for example, by looking only at amygdala connectivity and the rest of the brain, instead of looking at the entire connectivity matrix. Similarly, a clinical case-control study of depression would typically ...
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... other symptoms and collapse the depression items into a single categorical diagnosis....
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... A common alternative is to try to integrate the data through data reduction, for instance, by looking parsimoniously at a small number of brain networks instead of looking at all 35,000 connections or by summarizing itemwise clinical data into a four- or five-factor model. Although this ... biological scale of the abnormalities matches with the scale of data reduction. Another alternative is to try to directly integrate high-dimensional brain data with available granular clinical data using sparse canonical correlation analysis (sCCA).8...
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... Identifying Linked Dimensions of Psychopathology and Functional Connectivity...
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... features that predict a linear combination of clinical features in a data-driven manner (Xia et al., 2018). Through a process of permutation testing and correction for multiple comparisons, sCCA can be used to identify linked dimensions of psychopathology and functional connectivity. In this case, the ... identified the dimensions of mood, psychosis, fear, and externalizing behavior. A first step in looking at the data was to plot the brain connectivity score versus the clinical dimension score, which ... tight relationships between the brain and the clinical dimension and allowed for identifying the most highly rated clinical item in each of the dimensions. For example, the most highly rated item in the mood dimension ... “feeling sad” (Xia et al., 2018). Boot-strap resampling anyalysis was used to understand which clinical items significantly contribute to each dimension. Figure 7-4 is a ring plot that is laid out with classic discrete clinical diagnoses ...
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... Investigators found that the clinical item loadings accord with clinical experience, but they also cross diagnostic boundaries (Xia et al., 2018). These data-driven dimensions of psychopathology generally cohere with the clinical ...
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...FIGURE 7-4 Clinical item loadings accord with clinical experience and cross diagnostic boundaries.NOTE: OCD = obsessive–compulsive disorder; OPPO = oppositional; SUI = suicidality.SOURCES: As presented by Ted ...
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...genetic overlap between bipolar disorder and psychotic disorders. Furthermore, Satterthwaite and colleagues found that specific differences of functional connectivity define each dimension, but there are key features that are present across each ...
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...Studies of typical brain development show that modular segregation evolves throughout childhood and adolescence and supports executive function. In these data-driven dimensions of psychopathology, each of these dimensions is associated with a loss of this normative ...
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... dimensions of psychopathology can link abnormalities and functional connectivity. Modular segregation is a common feature across the dimensions, suggesting that it is an important aspect of brain health as ...
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... to work toward personalizing measures of functional connectivity. Typically, all the brain images from participants in a study are registered to a standard group atlas, with an implicit assumption that networks are in the same anatomical location for each person. Satterthwaite’s study addresses ...
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... of the brain most relevant in psychiatric illness. Across different sets, the most variability is present in the frontoparietal control network and in the ventral attention network. However, it is not yet understood how this individualized functional topography evolves in development or how it ...
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... Nonnegative matrix factorization is a machine-learning technique that can be used for identifying brain networks in individuals (Li et al., 2018), and it allows for defining 17 networks per person on a subject-specific basis (Cui et al., 2020). Single-subject data show that the spatial layout of ... networks varies between individuals. For example, looking into frontoparietal networks and the ventral attention networks either on a continuously loaded basis or on a binary basis shows that they vary...
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... of their placement on the anatomic cortex (Cui et al., 2020). The networks with the highest variability are in the frontoparietal control network and the ventral attention system, which are key networks for executive function (Cui et al., 2020)....
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... To explore how these highly variable networks evolve throughout the adolescent period, which is a critical period for the development of brain health and the period in which many neuropsychiatric symptoms begin to emerge, Cui and colleagues created a total network representation. This is a simple ... representation did not associate with age (which was surprising), but it was strongly associated with executive function (Cui et al., 2020). Children and adolescents who perform better in executive tasks have more total network representation allotted to systems that are important for executive ... , like the frontoparietal control network and the ventral attention network....
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... summary measure to the overall multivariate pattern of how the functional topography is laid out in the brain, researchers used split-half data and machine-learning techniques to predict executive function in completely unseen data with a relatively high degree of accuracy (Cui et al., 2020). The ... important weights were seen in the ventral attention system and in the frontoparietal control network, suggesting that the individualized layout of functional network topography could be a very important measure ...
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... Variability in the frontoparietal control network and the ventral attention system align with a high degree of evolutionary expansion, low cortical myelin content, and high cerebral blood flow (Cui et al. ... , 2020). This is consistent with an account whereby association networks evolve and become untethered from rigid developmental programs. This process is probably beneficial in many ways, because it allows for interindividual...
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... variability and adaptability as children are developing. However, it also comes at a metabolic cost and could potentially lead to higher vulnerability to neuropsychiatric syndromes during the critical period of adolescence....
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... BRAIN NETWORK AGING AND HEALTH ACROSS THE ADULT LIFE SPAN...
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... Gagan Wig, associate professor of behavioral and brain sciences at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas, presented on brain network aging and health across the adult ... span, with a focus on novel measures of brain health. Even in the absence of disease, aging is associated with progressive changes in cognition (Park and Reuter-Lorenz, 2009). However, simply comparing endpoints between younger and older adults is inadequate to understanding cognitive health decline. ... how perceptual speed declines within an individual over age at very different rates (Wilson et al., 2002). Although variance can be helpful in understanding how steeper declines might be related to degenerative processes versus typical aging, understanding the parameter space of healthy aging requires ...
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... of the brain can be used to characterize aging, including functional activation (Cabeza et al., 1997), structure of gray matter (Raz et al., 1997) and white matter (O’Sullivan et al., 2001), metabolism (Oh et al., 2016), and dopamine binding. However, none of these measures is considered a ... yet well understood how the information that is embedded in the signals provided by these tests correspond to individual variation in brain health and potential health outcomes....
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... Wig suggested that understanding brain health and risk of decline will require examining multiple brain measures together as well as identifying novel measures. His group conducts work based on the ... of a better term) of age-related cognitive decline. The network approach may be the most appropriate framework that is currently available for understanding cognition. Analyzing resting-state networks involves four main steps: identifying parcellated nodes of the brain, extracting the time course for ... node and computing pairwise correlations, building node-to-node correlation matrices for each subject, and then graphing a theoretic analysis of network structure (Bullmore and Sporns, 2009; Wig et al., 2011). The work he described focuses on the graph ...
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... Desirable Features of Measures of Health in Aging Brains...
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... of brain health, Wig outlined a set of desirable features for measures of brain health as people age: ease of collection, reliability, validity, and changeability. Validity of brain health measures can be characterized in different ways, such as having continuous variation across the adult life ... and not just at the endpoints or being related to cognition, even in “typical” ranges. It could also be described as being moderated by ... related to general health, environment, and lifestyle or by its predictive value in warning of impending dysfunction or adverse event. Changeability is desirable because it can be modified in ...
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... Differences in Brain Network Organization Across the Adult Life Span...
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... to functionally distinct brain systems (Power et al., 2011). Wig’s group is applying that observation in the context of healthy aging and how that organization differs across the adult life span. They are using the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study dataset, which includes data from more than ... subjects sampled across a broad segment of the adult life span collected via T1, DTI, and BOLD functional scans (multiple tasks and rest). Starting with the rest data, Wig’s group has worked to minimize known sources of variance by minimizing the influence of movement and ... quality control of the T1 and BOLD data, which are both susceptible to movement-related artifacts (Power et al., 2014; Savalia et al., 2017)....
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... (Han et al., 2018).10 Inherent in this description of functional systems is the idea that modularity requires dense within-system connections and sparser between-system connections (Power et al., 2011). Although this concept may underpin functional specialization of a network, the segregation ...
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... Having network communities that are segregated, but still able to communicate with one another, requires a fine balance of connections both within and between the communities. This confers functional specialization as well as some interaction between them (Wig, 2017). As functionally specialized ...
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... in the middle of this spectrum. To explore whether aging has an effect on this basic property, they took the nodes as a function of the system and classified them according to whether the connections were within or between systems and used the weighted average of the various connection types as ...
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... blue system, which corresponds to the visual system). The interactions between the association systems (i.e., within the circle in purple, yellow, and green, corresponding to the cingulo-opercular control system, frontal-parietal control system, and dorsal attention system, respectively) tend to ...
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... Reliability of the Relationship Between Brain System Segregation and Adult Age...
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... With respect to reliability of the relationship between system segregation and adult age, the age-versus-system segregation relationship has now been observed across multiple studies using different methods (Betzel et al., 2014; ... has also carried out independent replications based on other data sets that support the relationship between the system segregation measure and age. Additionally, his group has looked at whether system segregation is a reliable measure of an individual’s brain network organization by ...
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...FIGURE 7-5 Effect of aging on network segregation.SOURCES: As presented by Gagan Wig at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on September 25, 2019; Chan et al., 2014.
...
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... Relationship Between Brain System Segregation and Cognitive Ability...
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... Features of the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study dataset were also helpful for exploring how measures of the brain relate to cognitive ability. The data show that increasing segregation is related to long-term memory (Chan et al., 2014). When the age effect is ...
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... Lifespan Brain Study (Chan et al., 2018).11 In adults, lower socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with worse cognition (Koster et al., 2005) and greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease (Stern et al., 1994), so Wig’s group explored whether SES relates to this measure of brain ... . SES is a crude construct, but it does give a sense of access to resources, nutrition, health care, cognitive stimulation, and levels of stress....
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... In this case, Wig’s group defined SES by education and occupational status. The analysis, using continuous measures of age and SES, found that lower SES was associated with reduced system segregation in middle-age adulthood, but not in younger or older adults (see Figure 7-6). ... The relationship persists when controlling for demographics, physical health, mental health, cognitive ability, and a measure of childhood SES based on parental education. Because the measure does not differ for older adults, Wig suggested that this indicates a ... (Chan et al., 2018). For younger adults, he suggested that the commonly used SES measure is inappropriate, because they may have evolving educational and occupational states....
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... 11 A second round of data collection was conducted with relaxed exclusion criteria to include people with lower education and chronic health conditions, providing a more population-representative sample....
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... with reduced system segregation in middle-age adulthood.NOTES: Participants: Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (DLBS); N = 359; SES defined by education and occupational status.SOURCES: As presented by Gagan Wig at the workshop Brain Health Across the Life Span on September 25, 2019; Chan et al., 2018.
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... by bringing together multiple large longitudinal datasets to explore whether brain networks change as an individual grows older in both health and disease, whether brain network organization is modified by changes in brain degeneration, and if brain network patterns can be used to predict who ...
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... changes in brain network organization and cognition, Wig’s group plans to extensively characterize changes in health and lifestyle over time using biological measures, survey-based measures, and other techniques. Work focused on interventions is also under way to ...
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... One of the studies involves engaged learning of new skills by older adults, based on the idea that maintaining brain health and cognition involves continuous learning. Another study is looking at the potential for precision brain stimulation to alter network organization. ...
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... PANEL DISCUSSION ON THE WAY FORWARD IN MEASUREMENT AND RESEARCH...
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... Damien Fair, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience, associate professor of psychiatry, and associate scientist at the Advanced Imaging Research Center at the Oregon Health & Science University, asked the panelists to comment on the ...
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... Brain Health Growth Charts...
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... Barch highlighted a challenge in measuring the development and decline of brain health throughout the life span. It is possible to observe group differences and identify individuals, but it is not yet possible to ... which people need extra clinical intervention. This will require developing the appropriate psychometrics, measurement tools, databases, and study designs. She suggested tracking brain health through a “growth chart” to capture individual changes over time, as is already done ...
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... or not certain outcomes are healthy is contextualized by the specific environment. Manly noted that physical growth charts assume universality and variance in their predictions of important outcomes; they are generally intended to be screening tools rather than diagnostic tools. Brain health ...
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... rather than narrowing them, Manly cautioned. A participant added that body type and physiological factors such as insulin resistance can substantially affect brain development, so brain–body interactions would be important to ...
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... systems are already capturing important biologically based measures that could be easily scaled—through mobile platforms or otherwise—and then linked to meaningful health outcomes. Currently, differential treatment response to measures of brain health is a major gap in the literature ...
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... Lis Nielsen, chief of the individual behavioral processes branch of the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging, commented about the work on network differentiations and patterns over development. Currently, ...
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... Nielsen asked what research would be needed to facilitate the ability to capture this simply by assessing cognition and other functions. Wig replied that network functions correspond to systems of the brain that are functionally distinct. Data show that increasing ... a larger scale. It is not practical to collect neuroimaging data from everyone, so the aim is to identify measures or sets of features that relate to and mediate the relationships observed in imaging studies, but which can be collected simply and quickly for use in health care settings....
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... from efforts to address brain health issues that are known consequences of well-established factors—such as early adversity, SES, poverty, and stress—that also influence physical health (e.g., insulin resistance). Research on the biological bases of brain development and developing ... of brain health outcomes would be helpful in many ways, but there will always be individual variation, and this work should not preclude efforts to intervene on environmental factors that are known to influence brain development. For example, relatively ... positive effects on the brain health as well as physical health of children in those families. She emphasized that the focus on measuring outcomes and identifying people with brain health issues should not come at the expense of implementing strategies to address the environmental factors that are ...
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... external environmental factors than genetic influences, for example, these types of interventions are constrained by a range of political, economic, and social forces on a practical level. She reiterated that at the very least, 30 percent of mental illness is attributable to childhood adversities. ...
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... Geographic Diversity in Brain Health...
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... each other and predict outcomes. Barch noted that much of that geographic diversity reflects variation in different facets of SES, such as quality of schools, median income, and other metrics. Urbanicity also has both positive and negative effects on mental health outcomes that depend on factors such as ...
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... Fair suggested focusing on next steps in identifying interventions that would have the most “bang for the buck.” For instance, delaying school start times to allow adolescents to get a little more sleep is a relatively small change that would have a great effect....
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... Guidelines for Improving Brain Health...
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... of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and assistant professor at the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, suggested developing specific, practical guidelines for improving brain health that would be analogous to existing guidelines on how to ...
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...;s hierarchy of needs to the list of good practices for brain health, but that these needs should be developmentally tailored. Notably, for infants and young children, availability of a reliable caregiver should be added to the list of other survival needs like food, water, and shelter at the most ...
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... fruit. There is evidence that individuals with a history of early life adversity may be differentially responsive to treatments for depression and other mental disorders, but clinics do not typically ask about those factors. There may be value in collecting such data to examine implications for ... and treatment interventions addressing a range of cognitive and emotional disorders. Clinical assessment of personality, which can predict a portion of a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease, could ... be useful in informing treatment decisions, and awareness of risk could potentially encourage people to mitigate other risk factors for the disease. Similarly, evidence about differential response ... depression treatment as a function of early-life adversity could inform interventions and treatment decisions in a way that does not require any kind of new brain measure....
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