Paternal Mental Health Interacts with Children’s Hippocampal Volume to Predict Children’s Anxiety

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Research shows that parents influence children’s mental health (Goodman & Gotlib, 1999). Additional work implicates changes in hippocampal structure with anxiety and depression (Elif & Dallas, 2007; Mineur et al., 2013), and suggests that structural changes may precede clinical symptoms (Cha et al., 2016). Collectively, this work raises the possibility of an association between parental psychopathology and hippocampal structure, which may impact children’s mental health. Here, we address this hypothesis by quantifying how parental mental health function relates to children’s hippocampal structure and anxious/depressive symptomology in a normative sample. Given mothers’ and fathers’ varying roles in children’s socialization (Power & Parke, 1986), we assessed maternal and parental mental health separately. Though positive (Tupler & De Bellis., 2005) and negative (Hanson et al., 2015) associations between hippocampal volume and mental health symptoms have been observed in pediatric samples, rodent literature shows that stress reduces hippocampal volume (McEwen et al., 2016). We therefore predicted a negative relation between parental mental health burden and hippocampal volume in children, which may in turn relate to children’s mental health. We speculated that fathers may have a larger influence on hippocampal structure given their potentially unique impact on children’s engagement with their social world (Bogels et al., 2008), and hippocampal sensitivity to social information.

T2-weighted images of the hippocampus were acquired in 58 seven-to twelve-year-olds. Hippocampal volumes (overall, CA1, CA2/3, dentate gyrus, subiculum, posterior hippocampus) were interrogated. Volumes were obtained using a semi-automated segmentation approach (Yushkevich at al., 2015) with a developmentally validated atlas (Schlichting et al., 2019) and were adjusted for head size (Raz et al., 2005). Parents and children completed self-report measures of anxiety (STAI-C/STAI-Y; Spielberger et al., 1973; Spielberger, 1983) and depression (CDI:S/CES-D; Kovacs, 2003; Radloff, 1977).

Multiple linear regression analyses examined bilateral hippocampal volume and children’s mental health as a function of parental and child anxiety/depression symptomology, while controlling for age, sex, and SES. Parental depression and anxiety did not predict children's mental health (ps>0.706). However, age interacted with paternal depression (β=-0.34, p<0.007) and anxiety (β=-0.28, p<0.033) to predict CA2/3 volume (Fig. 1A-B), with more paternal mental health symptoms relating to larger CA2/3 volumes in younger participants. Furthermore, paternal anxiety and CA2/3 volume interacted to predict child anxiety (β=0.28, p=0.045) but not depression (β=0.12, p=0.421) (Fig. 1C). Neither maternal (ps>0.128) nor children’s (ps>0.468) mental health predicted children’s hippocampal volume.

Paternal mental health related to CA2/3 volume in young children, and both factors interacted to predict children’s anxiety symptoms. Given evidence that CA2/3 is sensitive to one’s social environment (Laurita & Spreng, 2017), we speculate that paternal socialization may be one factor contributing to the observed associations and may impact children’s mental health status. The positive association between paternal psychopathology and hippocampal volume aligns with research showing accelerated neural development under adversity (Callaghan & Tottenham, 2016). Though correlational, findings underscore the importance of considering the relationship between paternal psychopathology and hippocampal volume when examining the emergence of childhood anxiety and depression, and motivate future longitudinal work examining their unfolding influence on one another.

Authors

• Eliya Ben-Asher, University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Christine A Coughlin, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah Elizabeth Roome, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicole Varga, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Preston, University of Texas at Austin
  Non-Presenting Author