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Poster #58 - Growth Measures Predict Brain Functional Connectivity and Cognitive Outcomes in Bangladeshi Children Exposed to Adversities

Fri, March 22, 9:45 to 11:00am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Early exposure to adverse events in childhood has been shown to exert both proximal and distal effects on psychological and physical health and development. Stunted growth, a manifestation of malnutrition, has been found to influence the development of brain functions from early childhood and affect 161 million children worldwide. In Bangladesh, approximately half of the children experience poverty, urban crowding, poor sanitation, and frequent infections, and these adverse experiences cause delays in their physical growth and brain development. In the current study we employed EEG to examine the effects of early biological and psychosocial adversity on brain functional connectivity, and whether brain functional connectivity was associated with later cognitive functioning.
Method: Participants were recruited from an urban impoverished neighborhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh. One sample consisted of 85 children whose EEG and growth measures were collected at 6 months and their cognitive outcomes were assessed with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning at 24 months. The other sample consisted of 115 children with their EEG and growth measures collected at 36 months and their Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scales of Intelligence scores collected at 48 months. The growth measures were normalized according to the World Health Organization specifications to obtain the height for age (HAZ), weight for age (WAZ), and weight to height (WHZ) z-scoresEEG was recorded using a 128-channel net while children watched a screensaver with abstract shapes and soothing sounds for 2 mins. Functional connectivity was then estimated with weighted phase lag index between 48 cortical regions after source localization. Poverty and family care were included as the covariates due to previously shown associations with child cognition and brain development. Path analysis was used to test the indirect effect of growth measures on cognitive outcomes through brain functional connectivity.
Results: 1) Stunted growth was found to be accompanied by overall increased functional connectivity in the beta frequency band for the 36-month-old cohort, i.e., there was a negative correlation between the HAZ, WAZ, and WHZ scores and the overall functional connectivity. 2) For both cohorts, brain functional connectivity was negatively predictive of later cognitive outcomes at 24 and 48 months, respectively. 3) Stunted growth was found to have an impact on children’s IQ scores for the older cohort, and more importantly this effect was found to be mediated by brain functional connectivity in the beta band.
Discussion: The current results suggest that there is an association between growth measures and brain functional connectivity in Bangladeshi children exposed to early adversity. This association may reflect a broad deleterious effect of malnutrition on children’s neural development, which in turn influences cognitive functioning. The pathways and efficiency for neural communications in the brain may require more effort for children who are stunted, underweight or wasted, which might indicate an adaptive or compensatory mechanism for the delayed fiber growth in the brain. A second explanation is that synaptic pruning might be delayed in stunted children, which in turn leads to an abundance of connections and higher cost for communications between brain networks.

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