Self-regulatory deficits are common across a variety of childhood psychiatric disorders in which children have difficulty regulating their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. By leveraging previously collected prenatal and neonatal data and acquiring new data from mother-infant dyads, this study will identify circuit-based markers of regulatory deficits that are passed inter- generationally and persist from infancy to childhood. We will enroll 15-45 year-old pregnant women/mothers, approximately 75% Latina, who are receiving health care from our urban medical center, a sample that is underrepresented in U.S. biomedical research and facing significant psychosocial adversity. Age-appropriate measures of regulatory control processes will be acquired from their offspring at 4- and 14-months and during preschool and school age, including resting-state fMRI data from neonates and both resting and task-based fMRI data from school-aged children who were previously scanned as neonates. Behavioral measures of regulatory capacity and resting and task-based fMRI will also be acquired from the mothers, allowing us to associate maternal-neonatal indices of self-regulatory control. Thus, this study will uncover trajectories of control processes and circuits from infancy to school age and the intergenerational transmission of regulatory deficits from mothers to offspring. Findings will set the stage for future research aimed at engaging these circuits as targets for strategies to prevent the risk for future maladaptive behaviors and at identifying prenatal mechanisms underlying the intergenerational transmission of regulatory deficits, such as epigenetic and stress-mediated biological alterations. This study supports the NIMH strategic objective to chart mental illness trajectories to determine when, where, and how to intervene by elucidating the development of regulatory control across the first decade of life. This study also supports both the NIH BRAIN and precision medicine initiatives by evaluating the functional organization of control circuits across family generations and longitudinally, as well as using a novel imaging method to predict behavioral outcomes.
Self-regulatory deficits are common across a variety of childhood psychiatric disorders in which children have difficulty regulating their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This study will identify circuit-based markers of regulatory deficits that are passed inter-generationally and persist from infancy to childhood. The study will set the stage for future research aimed at engaging these circuits as targets for prevention strategies.
