Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle, WA, USA.
Dev Sci. 2018 Nov;21(6):e12686. doi: 10.1111/desc.12686. Epub 2018 Jun 11.
Community violence exposure is a common stressor, known to compromise youth cognitive and emotional development. In a diverse, urban sample of 22 adolescents, participants reported on community violence exposure (witnessing a beating or illegal drug use, hearing gun shots, or other forms of community violence) in early adolescence (average age 12.99), and underwent a neuroimaging scan 3-5 years later (average age 16.92). Community violence exposure in early adolescence predicted smaller manually traced left and right hippocampal and amygdala volumes in a model controlling for age, gender, and concurrent community violence exposure, measured in late adolescence. Community violence continued to predict hippocampus (but not amygdala) volumes after we also controlled for family aggression exposure in early adolescence. Community violence exposure was also associated with stronger resting state connectivity between the right hippocampus (using the manually traced structure as a seed region) and bilateral frontotemporal regions including the superior temporal gyrus and insula. These resting state connectivity results held after controlling for concurrent community violence exposure, SES, and family aggression. Although this is the first study focusing on community violence in conjunction with brain structure and function, these results dovetail with other research linking childhood adversity with smaller subcortical volumes in adolescence and adulthood, and with altered frontolimbic resting state connectivity. Our findings suggest that even community-level exposure to neighborhood violence can have detectable neural correlates in adolescents.
社区暴力暴露是一种常见的应激源，已知会损害青少年的认知和情感发展。在一个由 22 名青少年组成的多样化城市样本中，参与者报告了他们在青少年早期（平均年龄 12.99 岁）经历的社区暴力暴露情况（目睹殴打或非法吸毒、听到枪声或其他形式的社区暴力），并在 3 到 5 年后（平均年龄 16.92 岁）进行了神经影像学扫描。在控制了年龄、性别和晚期青少年社区暴力暴露的模型中，青少年早期的社区暴力暴露预测了左侧和右侧手动追踪海马体和杏仁核体积的减小。在我们还控制了青少年早期家庭攻击暴露后，社区暴力暴露仍然与海马体（但不是杏仁核）体积相关。社区暴力暴露还与右侧海马体（使用手动追踪结构作为种子区域）与双侧额颞叶区域（包括颞上回和岛叶）之间的静息状态连通性增强有关。在控制了同期社区暴力暴露、社会经济地位和家庭攻击后，这些静息状态连通性结果仍然成立。尽管这是第一项关注社区暴力与大脑结构和功能的研究，但这些结果与其他研究相吻合，这些研究将儿童期逆境与青少年和成年期较小的皮质下体积以及额叶边缘静息状态连通性改变联系起来。我们的研究结果表明，即使是社区层面的邻里暴力暴露也能在青少年中产生可检测的神经相关性。
