Dr. John Gilmore Brief Biography

Living in poverty places children at very high risk for problems across a variety of domains, including schooling, behavioral regulation, and health. Aspects of cognitive functioning, such as information processing, may underlie these kinds of problems. How might poverty affect the brain functions underlying these cognitive processes? Here, we address this question by observing and analyzing repeated measures of brain development of young children between five months and four years of age from economically diverse backgrounds (n = 77). In doing so, we have the opportunity to observe changes in brain growth as children begin to experience the effects of poverty. These children underwent MRI scanning, with subjects completing between 1 and 7 scans longitudinally. Two hundred and three MRI scans were divided into different tissue types using a novel image processing algorithm specifically designed to analyze brain data from young infants. Total gray, white, and cerebral (summation of total gray and white matter) volumes were examined along with volumes of the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. Infants from low-income families had lower volumes of gray matter, tissue critical for processing of information and execution of actions. These differences were found for both the frontal and parietal lobes. No differences were detected in white matter, temporal lobe volumes, or occipital lobe volumes. In addition, differences in brain growth were found to vary with socioeconomic status (SES), with children from lower-income households having slower trajectories of growth during infancy and early childhood. Volumetric differences were associated with the emergence of disruptive behavioral problems. Citation: Hanson JL, Hair N, Shen DG, Shi F, Gilmore JH, et al. (2013) Family Poverty Affects the Rate of Human Infant Brain Growth. PLoS ONE 8(12): e80954. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0080954 Editor: Olivier Baud, Hôpital Robert Debré, France Received April 15, 2013; Accepted October 9, 2013; Published December 11, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Hanson et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by the United States National Institute on Aging (grant AG041721 to DGS), National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (grants EB006733, EB008374, and EB009634 to DGS), National Institute on Drug Abuse (grant DA028087 to JLH), the United States National Institute of Mental Health (grants MH61285 and MH68858 to SDP; grant MH100217 to DGS; grant MH018029 for NH) and the Children’s Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families as part of the Child Neglect Research Consortium. Data used in the preparation of this article were obtained from the Pediatric MRI Data Repository created by the NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development which is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (contract numbers N01-HD02-3343, N01-MH9-0002, and N01-NS-9-2314, -2315, -2316, -2317, -2319 and -2320). With the exception of funding the establishment of the image database, the funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. A list of participating sites and study investigators can be found at http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/nihpd/info/participating_centers.html. This project was also supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School grants to BLW. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected]