University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications
Title
Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Psychiatry
Publication Date
2015-05-01
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Medicine and Health | Nervous System | Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Abstract
Socioeconomic disparities are associated with differences in cognitive development. The extent to which this translates to disparities in brain structure is unclear. We investigated relationships between socioeconomic factors and brain morphometry, independently of genetic ancestry, among a cohort of 1,099 typically developing individuals between 3 and 20 years of age. Income was logarithmically associated with brain surface area. Among children from lower income families, small differences in income were associated with relatively large differences in surface area, whereas, among children from higher income families, similar income increments were associated with smaller differences in surface area. These relationships were most prominent in regions supporting language, reading, executive functions and spatial skills; surface area mediated socioeconomic differences in certain neurocognitive abilities. These data imply that income relates most strongly to brain structure among the most disadvantaged children.
DOI of Published Version
10.1038/nn.3983
Source
Nat Neurosci. 2015 May;18(5):773-8. doi: 10.1038/nn.3983. Epub 2015 Mar 30. Link to article on publisher's site
Related Resources
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Nature neuroscience
PubMed ID
25821911
Repository Citation
Noble, Kimberly G.; Frazier, Jean A.; Kennedy, David N.; and Sowell, Elizabeth R., "Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents" (2015). University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications. 1002.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/faculty_pubs/1002
Comments
Full author list omitted for brevity. For full list of authors see article.