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This study examined three cohorts totaling over 500,000 participants from infancy to late adulthood and found that living in deprived neighborhoods is consistently associated with reduced brain volume in cortical and subcortical regions, with effects detectable from birth and intensifying with age. The relationship between neighborhood deprivation and psychiatric and neurological disease risk is partially mediated through these reductions in brain volume, particularly affecting regions vulnerable to neuropsychiatric disorders and involving dopaminergic and serotonergic neurotransmitter systems. Individual lifestyle factors explained only a small portion of the health burden, suggesting that broader environmental characteristics of deprived neighborhoods drive these effects beyond personal behaviors alone.
Why it matters
These findings identify specific neurobiological pathways through which neighborhood-level socioeconomic conditions affect brain health across the lifespan, potentially informing public health policies and preventive interventions targeting environmental factors rather than individual behaviors. Understanding that deprivation impacts brain structure from early development onward could guide resource allocation and community-level interventions to reduce neuropsychiatric disease burden.
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⚠️ Preprint – Noch nicht peer-reviewed
Dieser Artikel wurde noch nicht von unabhängigen Experten begutachtet. Die Ergebnisse sind vorläufig und sollten mit Vorsicht interpretiert werden.
Neighbourhood deprivation is one of the few potential policy-modifiable risk factors for psychiatric and neurological disorders, but the neurobiological pathways underlying these associations remain unclear. We investigated these relationships across three cohorts spanning the life span: the Healthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study (n = 84, aged 0 to 4 weeks postnatal), the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (n = 4,792, aged 9 to 10 years), and the UK Biobank (UKB; approximately 500,000 adults, aged 44 to 87 years). Neighbourhood deprivation was associated with elevated disease risk, and individual lifestyle factors accounted for only a small fraction of this burden, indicating that the much larger residual effect reflects broader contextual characteristics of deprived environments rather than individual behaviours alone. Across all cohorts, greater deprivation consistently predicted lower cortical and subcortical brain volume, with effects detectable in early development and substantially stronger in adulthood. Across disorders, regional brain volume emerged as a consistent neuroanatomical mediator linking neighbourhood deprivation to neuropsychiatric disease. We further showed that deprivation preferentially affects brain regions intrinsically vulnerable to neuropsychiatric disorders. Spatial decoding analyses implicated dopaminergic and serotonergic neurotransmitter systems together with specific excitatory and inhibitory neuronal classes. Importantly, both the deprivation effects and their neuroanatomical mediation patterns were replicated across independent populations. Our study delivers a translational framework linking neighbourhood deprivation to brain health, which could inform public health policies and preventive interventions.