Neurodevelopmental imprints of sociomarkers in adolescent brain connectomes

Abstract

Neural consequences of social disparities are not yet rigorously investigated. How socioeconomic conditions influence children’s connectome development remains unknown. This paper endeavors to gauge how precisely the connectome structure of the brain can predict an individual’s social environment, thereby inversely assessing how social influences are engraved in the neural development of the Adolescent brain. Utilizing Adolescent Brain and Cognition Development (ABCD) data (9099 children residing in the United States), we found that social conditions both at the household and neighborhood levels are significantly associated with specific neural connections. Solely with brain connectome data, we train a linear support vector machine (SVM) to predict socio-economic conditions of those adolescents. The classification performance generally improves when the thresholds of the advantageous and disadvantageous environments compartmentalize the extreme cases. Among the tested thresholds, the 20th and 80th percentile thresholds using the dual combination of household income and neighborhood education yielded the highest Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) of 0.8224. We identified 8 significant connections that critically contribute to predicting social environments in the parietal lobe and frontal lobe. Insights into social factors that contribute to early brain connectome development is critical to mitigate the disadvantages of children growing up in unfavorable neighborhoods.