Associations Between Neighborhood Disadvantage, Resting-State Functional Connectivity, and Behavior in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study: The Moderating Role of Positive Family and School Environments

BACKGROUND: Neighborhood disadvantage has consistently been associated with mental health and cognitive function, in addition to alterations in brain function and connectivity. However, positive environmental influences may buffer these effects. The aim of this study was to examine the association between neighborhood disadvantage and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), the moderating role of positive parenting and school environment, and relationships between disadvantage-associated rsFC patterns and mental health and cognition. METHODS: In this preregistered study, we tested this hypothesis in a large sample of 7618 children (aged 9-10 years) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Specifically, we analyzed the relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and system-level FC. We also tested whether positive family and school environmental factors and sex moderated effects. Finally, we investigated multivariate relationships between disadvantage associated rsFC patterns and cognition and mental health. RESULTS: Disadvantage was associated with widespread alterations in FC across both higher-order (e.g., default mode network and dorsal attention network) and sensorimotor functional systems, some of which were moderated by positive environments. Implicated connections showed multivariate associations with behavior, whereby disadvantage-associated rsFC was generally associated with worse cognition and mental health. Disadvantage associated connections also predicted variation in cognitive scores using machine learning models. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings shed light on potential mechanisms (i.e., alteration of neural circuitry) through which neighborhood disadvantage may affect youth cognition and mental well-being. This work highlights the importance of positive family and school environments in mitigating some of these effects.

Automated summary

This study found that neighborhood disadvantage is associated with alterations in children's brain functional connectivity, and positive family and school environments can mitigate some of these effects. The connections associated with disadvantage show complex relationships with children's cognition and mental health.