Interpersonal early adversity demonstrates dissimilarity from early socioeconomic disadvantage in the course of human brain development: A meta-analysis

Abstract

It has been established that early-life adversity impacts brain development, but the role of development itself has largely been ignored. We take a developmentally-sensitive approach to examine the neurodevelopmental sequelae of early adversity in a preregistered meta-analysis of 27,234 youth (birth to 18-years-old), providing the largest group of adversity-exposed youth to date. Findings demonstrate that early-life adversity does not have an ontogenetically uniform impact on brain volumes, but instead exhibits age-, experience-, and region-specific associations. Relative to non-exposed comparisons, interpersonal early adversity (e.g., family-based maltreatment) was associated with initially larger volumes in frontolimbic regions until ~10-years-old, after which these exposures were linked to increasingly smaller volumes. By contrast, socioeconomic disadvantage (e.g., poverty) was associated with smaller volumes in temporal-limbic regions in childhood, which were attenuated at older ages. These findings advance ongoing debates regarding why, when, and how early-life adversity shapes later neural outcomes.

Figure 1.

PRISMA flow diagram for systematic review.

Figure 2.. Age-dependent associations between early-life adversity and brain volume.

A. All age-dependent associations indicate that the magnitude of the association between early adversity exposure (vs. no exposure) and brain volume changes with age. pink = negative age-related change with interpersonal early adversity (vs. non-exposed comparison); green = positive age-related change with higher (vs. lower) early socioeconomic disadvantage; dark gray = no age-related associations with either type of early adversity exposure. B. Amygdala and hippocampus show different age-related associations for interpersonal early adversity exposure (vs. no exposure) and early socioeconomic disadvantage. The size of the points reflects the relative sample size. Other regions not shown here exhibit comparable patterns of age-related change for interpersonal early adversity (ventral anterior cingulate cortex [vACC], ventrolateral prefrontal cortex [vlPFC], ventromedial prefrontal cortex [vmPFC]; see Supplementary Information, Figure S24) and early socioeconomic disadvantage (parahippocampus; inferior, middle, and superior temporal gyri; see Supplementary Information, Figure S25). C. Interpersonal early adversity preferentially shapes frontolimbic circuitry, with age-related changes supporting adversity-induced acceleration models. That is, interpersonal early adversity may contribute to early adversity-induced acceleration in childhood with a long-term tradeoff of later allostatic overload and attenuated neural plasticity. Early socioeconomic disadvantage preferentially shapes cortical-limbic structures.