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2-176 - Recovery from profound early psychosocial neglect 16 years after placement into institutional care

Fri, March 22, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 321

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The role of early experiences in shaping brain and behavioral development is often studied in animal models, where one can manipulate early experiences in order to examine the effects on development and neural architecture; in humans, however, investigators often depend on so-called “accidents of nature.” A particularly tragic of such an experiment are the >170,000 young Romanian children who experienced severe psychosocial deprivation after being abandoned to institutional care, a subset of which were subsequently placed into family care.

The Bucharest Early Intervention Project was launched in 2000 to examine the effects of early, profound psychosocial deprivation on multiple domains of development; secondary goals were to determine if the negative sequelae of deprivation can be reversed by placement into high quality foster care and if recovery was impacted by placement timing. In this symposium we will highlight findings from four key domains: EEG, structural MRI, white matter integrity and neural responses obtained during a number of executive function tasks. We will report how early neglect influences brain oscillation patterns involved in cognitive control; how white matter integrity is impacted by deprivation; how gray and white matter partially recover following removal from institutional care; and how early deprivation negatively impacts neural indices of error monitoring and their association with ADHD symptoms. In sum, by age 16 we observe both the extended impact of early institutionalization and the subsequent ability of family care in early and middle childhood to address some existing deficits.

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