Neurostructural traces of early life adversities: A meta-analysis exploring age- and adversity-specific effects

Abstract

Early life adversities (ELAs) are associated with an increased risk of psychopathology, with studies suggesting a relation to structural brain alterations. Given the recently growing evidence of ELA effects on brain structure, an updated summary is highly warranted. Therefore, anatomical likelihood estimation was used to conduct a coordinate-based meta-analysis of gray matter volume (GMV) alterations associated with ELAs, including sub-analyses for different age groups and maltreatment as specific ELA-type. The analyses uncovered a convergence of pooled ELA-effects on GMV in the right hippocampus and amygdala and the left inferior frontal gyrus, age-specific effects for the right amygdala and hippocampus in children and adolescents, and maltreatment-specific effects for the right perigenual anterior cingulate cortex in adults. These results reveal a possible underlying commonality in the impact of adversity and also point to specific age and maltreatment effects. They suggest neural markers of ELAs in regions involved in socio-emotional functioning and stress regulation, with the potential to be used as targets for interventions designed to buffer or reverse harmful ELA-effects.

Keywords: Childhood adversity; Early life stress; Magnetic resonance imaging.

Fig. 1.

PRISMA Diagram depicting the search and screening procedure. fMRI – functional magnetic resonance imaging, ELA – early life adversity, DTI – diffusion tensor imaging, FT – full text, GMV - gray matter volume, CT - cortical thickness, GMD - gray matter density.

Fig. 2.

Illustration of Main Results. A) Cluster of convergence over all types of ELAs in the right hippocampus and amygdala with a peak at (22,−6,−18) shown here. Blue outlines the right amygdala, green outlines the right hippocampus. B) Cluster of convergence over all types of ELAs in the left IFG with a peak at (−50,12,30) shown here. C) Cluster of convergence over all types of ELAs in children / adolescents in the right hippocampus and amygdala with a peak at (22,−6,−18) shown here. Blue outlines the right amygdala, green outlines the right hippocampus. D) Cluster of convergence over all types of ELAs in healthy adults in the right pgACC with a peak at (12,48,10) shown here. The same cluster emerges in the analysis of maltreatment in healthy individuals. MRICroGL was used to visualize the effects. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)