The environment in which children grow up can play a central role in their mental development and psychological well-being. For instance, past studies have found that a family’s socioeconomic status and the opportunities available to children are linked to different developmental outcomes, such as learning trajectories, attention and problem-solving capabilities.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School recently carried out a study aimed at exploring the relationship between neighborhood-based opportunities available to children and their brain development. Their findings, published in Translational Psychiatry, suggest that a broader range of community resources can positively affect brain development, pinpointing specific characteristics of neighborhoods that appear to be most influential.
“Neighborhood opportunities are key influences on child development, yet existing research has largely emphasized socioeconomic indicators as proxies for environmental context,” wrote Neslihan Yildiz-Ozhan, Benson S. Ku and their colleagues in their paper. “However, it remains unclear which specific components of multidimensional neighborhood features are most strongly associated with tract-level white matter microstructure and cognition in children.”
The link between community resources and brain development
As part of their study, the researchers analyzed data collected from more than 6,000 children ages 8 to 10 who took part in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The ABCD project is a long-term research endeavor aimed at monitoring brain development and the cognitive (i.e., mental) capabilities of children across the United States.
“Using data from 6141 children in the ABCD Study and well-validated harmonized diffusion MRI, we examined multilevel associations between neighborhood opportunity, white matter microstructure, and cognitive performance,” wrote Yildiz-Ozhan, Ku and their colleagues.
“Neighborhood opportunity was measured using the Child Opportunity Index 2.0 (COI), which includes an overall score, three domain-level scores capturing Education, Social-Economic, and Health-Environment conditions, and 29 individual neighborhood indicators. Generalized additive models were used to characterize potentially non-linear associations while accounting for demographic and familial factors.”
Yildiz-Ozhan, Ku and their colleagues assessed the opportunities available to different children considered in their study using the COI. This is a metric that can be used to rank neighborhoods based on the resources they offer to children and young people.
The researchers tried to determine whether overall scores attained using this metric, along with indicators of the opportunities that neighborhoods offered in three distinct domains (i.e., education, socioeconomic status and health-environment), were statistically linked to the organization and integrity of white matter in the brain. In addition, they tried to determine whether neighborhood opportunity scores were related to the children’s performance on cognitive tests.
Interestingly, the team found that children who lived in neighborhoods that offered greater opportunities exhibited greater fractional anisotropy (FA), a marker of white matter organization and integrity, particularly in a region known as the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus I (SLF-I). This is a white matter tract that is known to play a role in reasoning, the regulation of movements, spatial attention and other mental functions.
“Higher neighborhood opportunity was also associated with better cognitive performance, with the strongest associations observed for Crystallized Cognition, reflecting accumulated knowledge and experience-based abilities,” wrote the authors.
“Mediation analyses indicated that SLF-I FA partially accounted for the association between neighborhood opportunity and cognitive performance. At the indicator level, access to high-quality education, higher neighborhood employment rates, and greater health insurance coverage emerged as the strongest correlates of neurocognitive outcomes.”
Guiding future community-level interventions
Collectively, the results of this study suggest that community resources and the opportunities available to children influence their brain development. Children living in neighborhoods with greater opportunities appeared to exhibit higher FA in the SLF-I and performed better on various cognitive tests.
In the future, other researchers could try to validate these findings or set out to explore the link between community resources and brain development using other methods, metrics and imaging data. Eventually, the recent efforts by Yildiz-Ozhan and her colleagues could inspire leaders and health care organizations to invest in new initiatives designed to broaden opportunities for children living in different geographical regions to best support their mental and neural development.
“Together, these findings emphasize the value of multidimensional neighborhood measures and highlight specific, modifiable contextual factors that may represent targets for community-level interventions aimed at supporting neurocognitive development during childhood,” wrote the authors.