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Infant stress predicted reduced brain connectivity, anxiety in teenage girls
High levels of stress during infancy were associated with differences in brain functioning and anxiety in teenage girls, researchers reported.
“We wanted to understand how stress early in life impacts patterns of brain development, which might lead to anxiety and depression,” study researcher Cory Burghy, PhD, of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in a press release. “Young girls who, as preschoolers, had heightened cortisol levels, go on to show lower brain connectivity in important neural pathways for emotion regulation — and that predicts symptoms of anxiety during adolescence.”
Cory Burghy
The study included both males and females, now aged 21 to 22 years, who were selected from the Wisconsin Study of Families and Work (WSFW), a project led by Marilyn Essex, PhD, and a team of UW-Madison researchers that began in 1990 to examine the effects of maternity leave, day care and other factors on family stress in 570 children and their families. The WSFW project has since evolved into a study of the effect of stress and other risk factors.
When the children were in preschool, saliva samples were taken in the late afternoon to determine cortisol levels, which reflected the children’s experiences of stress throughout the day. Fourteen years later, 57 of those participants underwent resting-state functional MRI scans, designed to study the strength of connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain implicated in the regulation of negative emotion. During that time, participants also reported on symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The researchers looked back at earlier results and measured participants’ exposure to maternal stress, which included reports of depressive symptoms, parenting stress, marital conflict, the feeling of being overwhelmed in a parenting role, and financial stress.
Results indicated that, in females only, stress during infancy was associated with higher cortisol levels in preschool, which in turn predicted reduced connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (P<.05). Furthermore, impaired connectivity between these brain regions was associated with adolescent anxiety, while increased connectivity was linked to depression (P<.05).
According to the researchers, early stress and dysregulated neuroendocrine function, or higher cortisol levels, may have affected the development of the girls’ brains, changing the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. When taken together, these factors accounted for 64.6% of the variance in adolescent anxiety symptoms.
“Now that we are showing that early life stress and cortisol affect brain development, it raises important questions about what we can do to better support young parents and families,” Richard Davidson, PhD, one of the study’s researchers, said in the press release.
Disclosure: The researchers reported no relevant financial disclosures.
Perspective
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The early life stresses identified in the study were maternal depression, marital conflict, parenting stresses and financial stresses in the first year of a child’s life. This points clearly to our collective responsibility to identify maternal depression in the postpartum period and to provide significant support for families, especially poor families, routinely following a child’s birth and throughout early childhood. This will not only alleviate family distress at the time but also can be protective against depressive and anxiety symptoms in adolescence and beyond. Early family support must be part of our practice and our community’s effort to promote health and prevent distress.