Turesky Ted K, Pirazzoli Laura, Shama Talat, Kakon Shahria Hafiz, Haque Rashidul, Islam Nazrul, Someshwar Amala, Gagoski Borjan, Petri William A, Nelson Charles A, Gaab Nadine
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience, Division of Developmental Medicine, Department of Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2024 Oct 16;2. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00319. eCollection 2024.
Over three hundred million children live in environments of extreme poverty, and the biological and psychosocial hazards endemic to these environments often expose these children to infection, disease, and inflammatory responses. Chronic inflammation in early childhood has been associated with diminished cognitive outcomes, and despite this established relationship, the mechanisms explaining how inflammation affects brain development are not well known. Importantly, the prevalence of chronic inflammation in areas of extreme poverty raises the possibility that it may also serve as a mechanism explaining the known relationship between low socioeconomic status (SES) and altered brain development. To examine these potential pathways, seventy-nine children growing up in an extremely poor, urban area of Bangladesh underwent MRI scanning at 6 years of age. Structural brain images were submitted to Mindboggle software, a Docker-compliant and high-reproducibility tool for regional estimations of volume, surface area, cortical thickness, sulcal depth, and mean curvature. C-reactive protein was assayed at eight time points between infancy and 5 years of age, and the frequency with which children had elevated concentrations of inflammatory marker represented the measure of chronic inflammation. Childhood SES was measured with maternal education and income-to-needs (i.e., monthly household income divided by the number of household members). Chronic inflammation predicted volume in bilateral basal ganglia structures and mediated the link between maternal education and bilateral putamen volumes. These findings suggest that chronic inflammation is associated with brain morphometry in the basal ganglia, predominantly the putamen, and further offers inflammation as a potential mechanism linking SES to brain development.
超过3亿儿童生活在极端贫困的环境中，这些环境中普遍存在的生物和心理社会危害常常使这些儿童面临感染、疾病和炎症反应。幼儿期的慢性炎症与认知能力下降有关，尽管存在这种既定关系，但解释炎症如何影响大脑发育的机制尚不清楚。重要的是，极端贫困地区慢性炎症的普遍存在增加了一种可能性，即它也可能是解释低社会经济地位（SES）与大脑发育改变之间已知关系的一种机制。为了研究这些潜在途径，79名在孟加拉国一个极其贫困的城市地区长大的儿童在6岁时接受了MRI扫描。脑部结构图像被提交给Mindboggle软件，这是一个符合Docker标准且具有高再现性的工具，用于区域体积、表面积、皮质厚度、脑沟深度和平均曲率的估计。在婴儿期至5岁之间的8个时间点检测C反应蛋白，儿童炎症标志物浓度升高的频率代表慢性炎症的指标。儿童SES通过母亲教育程度和收入需求比（即家庭月收入除以家庭成员数量）来衡量。慢性炎症预测双侧基底神经节结构的体积，并介导母亲教育程度与双侧壳核体积之间的联系。这些发现表明，慢性炎症与基底神经节，主要是壳核的脑形态学有关，并进一步提出炎症是将SES与大脑发育联系起来的一种潜在机制。
