This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2023
System-level cortical maturation links to adolescent resilience to adverse life events
System-level cortical maturation links to adolescent resilience to adverse life events
Introduction: Adolescence is a period of increased brain reorganization that is essential to biological and psychosocial maturation, but also to mental health (Paus et al., 2008). Normative adolescent brain maturation as captured via neuroimaging follows two main modes: 1) conservative strengthening...
Saved in:
Personal Name(s): | Hettwer, Meike (Corresponding author) |
---|---|
Valk, Sofie (Corresponding author) / Eickhoff, Simon / Dorfschmidt, Lena / Bethlehem, Richard | |
Contributing Institute: |
Gehirn & Verhalten; INM-7 |
Imprint: |
2023
|
Conference: | Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Montreal (Canada), 2023-07-22 - 2023-07-26 |
Document Type: |
Conference Presentation |
Research Program: |
Neuroimaging Multilevel Brain Organization and Variability |
Subject (ZB): | |
Publikationsportal JuSER |
Introduction: Adolescence is a period of increased brain reorganization that is essential to biological and psychosocial maturation, but also to mental health (Paus et al., 2008). Normative adolescent brain maturation as captured via neuroimaging follows two main modes: 1) conservative strengthening of initially strong connections, or 2) disruptive remodeling, i.e. strengthening of initially weak connections and vice versa (Váša et al., 2020). While adverse experiences and psychopathological processes can alter maturational trajectories (Stenson et al., 2021), adolescent reorganization may also hold potential for flexible adaptation to risk factors. Thus, normative maturation facilitating psychosocial skills may also aid well-being through resilience to adversity.Methods: We analyzed age-related changes in microstructural profile covariance (MPC; Fig. 1A) and resting-state functional connectivity (FC; Fig. 1B) in a longitudinal cohort of individuals aged 14-26 (n=295; 512 scans; 50.8% female). MPC reflects inter-regional similarity of intracortical profiles based on myelin-sensitive magnetic transfer (MT) data sampled at ten cortical depths. We first identified maturational modes by correlating the whole-brain MPC and FC patterns of each region at age 14 with the age-related changes of these patterns (14-26y; computed via edge-wise linear mixed effect models; Fig. 1C). Positive correlations indicate conservative and negative correlations disruptive development (FDR<0.05). Next, we investigated whether observed maturational patterns may contribute to resilience to adverse life events. From the total cohort, we drew a sub-sample (n=281) of individuals who reported adverse life experiences in the past 18 months. Conceptualizing resilience as adaptation to adversity, individuals were matched based on their adversity load and allocated to either high (n=88) or low resilient (n=89) groups based on reported well-being scores (top or bottom 33%, respectively; Fig. 2A). Structural and functional brain maturational modes were contrasted between the two groups via Fisher’s z differences.Results: Our work describes topologically heterogeneous patterns of structural and functional maturational modes (Fig. 1D) and differential associations with resilience. We observed disruptive development of MPC in frontal and parietal cortical areas, and conservative development in sensory, paralimbic, temporal and medial frontal regions. Linking structure to function, we found parallel conservative development in regions involved in sensory- and attention-related processes. Default mode and frontoparietal networks showed both cross-modal disruptive rewiring and a structure-function divergence, in which structure showed conservative but function disruptive developmental patterns (Fig. 1E). Last, we found that individuals who maintain better well-being after exposure to adverse life events showed overall less conservative and more disruptive functional maturational patterns, indicating increased functional network rewiring during development. Effects were smaller for structural patterns and suggested a potential benefit of disruptive MPC development only in regions where change occurs in parallel with functional change (Fig. 2B).Conclusion: Our longitudinal findings show overlapping but distinct patterns of structural and functional reorganization during adolescence. Cross-modal cortical transformations and structure-function decoupling in maturational modes were observed in association and paralimbic cortex, which are known to show protracted plasticity associated with both sociocognitive refinement and psychopathological alterations (Sydnor et al., 2021). Our findings suggest that brain remodeling throughout adolescence is especially pronounced in individuals showing better adaptation to adverse life events, and may thus facilitate resilience. This observation is in line with current psychological constructs of resilience as an adaptive, flexible process (Kalisch et al., 2017). |