Maltreatment predicts centiles of individual variation from normative brain growth in children

Exposure to maltreatment in childhood is posited to profoundly disrupt brain development with adverse consequences for cognitive development and health across the lifespan. Here we use “brain charts” from the largest available neuroimaging database to quantify individual brain volumes relative to normative brain growth distributions in 299 children, aged 3 to 13 years, including 123 children with clinically verified maltreatment exposure. Using magnetic resonance imaging, we obtain volumes of cortical grey, total white, and subcortical grey matter and derive chart-based centiles for each child and tissue type.

In our sample, children with maltreatment exposure exhibit lower mean brain centiles across tissues than unexposed children. Associations of greater maltreatment severity with lower brain centiles do not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Lower brain centiles are associated with lower intellectual ability and more behavioural problems.

These findings provide evidence for widespread differences in brain structure associated with childhood maltreatment and their relevance to intellectual ability and behavioural functioning. We thank the children and families who participated in this study and the coordinators, research assistants, and students who supported data collection. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF 01GL1743A), NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence (DFG EXC 2049) (CH) and the Max Planck School of Cognition (JJM, CH).

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. These authors jointly supervised this work: Claudia Buss, Christine Heim. Institute of Medical Psychology, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany Johannes Julius Mohn, Martin Bauer, Ferdinand Hoffmann, Sonja Entringer, Claudia Buss & Christine Heim Max Planck School of Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany Experimental and Clinical Research Center, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), Berlin-Potsdam Partner Site, Berlin, Germany Ferdinand Hoffmann, Sonja Entringer, Sibylle M.

Winter, Claudia Buss & Christine Heim Development, Health and Disease Research Program, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Jerod Rasmussen, Sonja Entringer & Claudia Buss Department of Pediatrics, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA Institute of Neuroradiology, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany German Center for Child and Adolescent Health (DZKJ), Berlin Partner Site, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, corporate member of Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

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