It has been hypothesized for years that most psychiatric disorders are the result of abnormal trajectories of early childhood brain development and a major priority for NIMH is to better understand how risk for psychiatric disorders unfold in childhood, to inform early intervention strategies that prevent or mitigate risk and illness severity. The UNC Early Brain Development Study is a longitudinal study that has followed children, enrolled prenatally, with imaging and developmental assessments at birth and at ages 1, 2 4, and 6 years. Children from this cohort are now reaching pre-adolescence, a period in which cognitive and behavioral abnormalities associated with psychiatric disease, including executive function, attention, and anxiety, are emerging. Very little is currently known about the relationship between brain structure and development and risk phenotypes in pre-adolescence; this represents is a major gap in our knowledge and a critical need for study. We propose to follow 446 children in our longitudinal cohort at ages 8 and 10 years of age. MRIs, including structural, diffusion tensor, and resting state functional imaging, will be performed. Cognitive development and behavioral development will be assessed, with a focus on the phenotypes of executive function, attention, and anxiety, consistent with RDoC constructs and important for psychiatric disorder risk. Knowledge gained in this study will improve our basic understanding of human brain development in childhood, allow us to delineate childhood predictors of risk phenotypes in late childhood, and ultimately help target periods of childhood development for early intervention. Relevance New knowledge gained in this study will provide a dramatically improved framework for understanding childhood brain development and its relationship to cognitive and behavioral outcomes in late childhood, and to risk for subsequent psychiatric disorders.
For years it has been hypothesized that psychiatric disorders are the result of abnormal trajectories of childhood brain development, though there is little direct evidence to support that hypothesis. The UNC Early Brain Development Study is a longitudinal study that has followed children with imaging and developmental assessments from birth to age 6 years. We will study brain structure and function in these children at 8 and 10 year olds with MRI to see if we can identify childhood predictors of behavior in 8 and 10 year olds that is considered at risk for adolescent and adult onset of psychiatric illness, which will ultimately help target periods of childhood development for early intervention.
| Gilmore, John H; Knickmeyer, Rebecca C; Gao, Wei (2018) Imaging structural and functional brain development in early childhood. Nat Rev Neurosci 19:123-137 |
| Girault, Jessica B; Langworthy, Benjamin W; Goldman, Barbara D et al. (2018) The Predictive Value of Developmental Assessments at 1 and 2 for Intelligence Quotients at 6. Intelligence 68:58-65 |
