Associations between early trajectories of amygdala development and later school-age anxiety in two longitudinal samples.

Amygdala function is implicated in the pathogenesis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and anxiety. We investigated associations between early trajectories of amygdala growth and anxiety and ASD outcomes at school age in two longitudinal studies: high- and low-familial likelihood for ASD, Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS, n = 257) and typically developing (TD) community sample, Early Brain Development Study (EBDS, n = 158). Infants underwent MRI scanning at up to 3 timepoints from neonate to 24 months. Anxiety was assessed at 6-12 years. Linear multilevel modeling tested whether amygdala volume growth was associated with anxiety symptoms at school age. In the IBIS sample, children with higher anxiety showed accelerated amygdala growth from 6 to 24 months. ASD diagnosis and ASD familial likelihood were not significant predictors. In the EBDS sample, amygdala growth from birth to 24 months was associated with anxiety. More anxious children had smaller amygdala volume and slower rates of amygdala growth. We explore reasons for the contrasting results between high-familial likelihood for ASD and TD samples, grounding results in the broader literature of variable associations between early amygdala volume and later anxiety. Results have the potential to identify mechanisms linking early amygdala growth to later anxiety in certain groups.

Clinical Trajectories in Adolescents with and without a History of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: The BRIDGES Longitudinal Study.

Background: Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a highly prevalent clinical concern in adolescents and is associated with impaired functioning and suicide risk. The BRIDGES (BRain Imaging Development of Girls' Emotion and Self) study was designed to collect longitudinal clinical and neurobiological data to advance our understanding of NSSI in adolescents. The purpose of this paper is to describe the clinical data collected as part of this study, including psychiatric diagnoses, depression symptoms, episodes of non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, childhood trauma, and personality domains. Methods: The baseline sample included 164 adolescents aged 12-16 assigned female at birth (Mean age = 14.97, SD = 1.20) with NSSI histories ranging from none to severe. Participants and their parent/guardian were invited to provide data at three time points spaced approximately one year apart. Descriptive analyses were conducted to provide estimates of rates and trajectories of clinical data. Results: Of the 164 study participants, 75.61% and 57.93% completed the second and third time points, respectively. Visual inspection of the data suggests an overall trend of decreasing severity of psychopathology over time, and adolescents with a history of NSSI appeared to have higher rates of psychopathology than those without. Conclusions: This paper describes longitudinal clinical trajectories in adolescents with a range of NSSI histories and presents readers with an overview of the rich, publicly available dataset that we hope will inspire future research to advance the understanding of the neurodevelopmental trajectories associated with NSSI, depression, and suicide risk.

Responding to joint attention as a developmental catalyst: Longitudinal associations with language and social responsiveness.

Joint attention (JA), infants' ability to engage in triadic attention with another person and a separate object or event, emerges in infancy. Responding to joint attention (RJA) develops earlier than initiating joint attention (IJA) and may benefit from a reconceptualization from a competence to a skill that varies in performance. Investigating associations between RJA performance and important skills of toddlerhood such as language, social responsiveness, and executive function (EF) in typically developing samples can better elucidate how RJA may serve as a developmental precursor to later dimensional skills, with implications for both typical and atypical development. Here, 210 (82% White) infants completed the Dimensional Joint Attention Assessment (DJAA), a naturalistic play-based assessment of RJA, at 8-15 months. At 16-38 months social responsiveness, verbal ability, and EF were assessed. Multilevel models showed that DJAA scores were associated with later verbal abilities and parent-reported social responsiveness. Exploratory analyses showed trend-level associations between RJA and EF. Results establish the content validity of the DJAA as a measure of RJA, and longitudinal associations with later verbal ability and social responsiveness. Future work should examine EF emergence and consolidation, and RJA and later EF associations.

Variability in Responding to Joint Attention Cues in the First Year is Associated With Autism Outcome.

OBJECTIVE: With development, infants become increasingly responsive to the many attention-sharing cues of adults; however, little work has examined how this ability emerges in typical development or in the context of early autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study characterized variation in the type of cue needed to elicit a response to joint attention (RJA) using the Dimensional Joint Attention Assessment (DJAA) during naturalistic play. METHOD: We measured the average redundancy of cue type required for infants to follow RJA bids from an experimenter, as well as their response consistency, in 268 infants at high (HR, n = 68) and low (LR, N = 200) familial risk for ASD. Infants were assessed between 8 and 18 months of age and followed up with developmental and clinical assessments at 24 or 36 months. Our sample consisted of LR infants, as well as HR infants who did (HR-ASD) and did not (HR-neg) develop ASD at 24 months. RESULTS: We found that HR and LR infants developed abilities to respond to less redundant (more sophisticated) RJA cues at different rates, and that HR-ASD infants displayed delayed abilities, identifiable as early as 9 months, compared to both HR-neg and LR infants. Interestingly, results suggest that HR-neg infants may exhibit a propensity to respond to less redundant (more sophisticated) RJA cues relative to both HR-ASD and LR infants. CONCLUSION: Using an approach to characterize variable performance of RJA cue-reading abilities, findings from this study enhance our understanding of both typical and ASD-related proficiencies and deficits in RJA development.

Emerging Evidence for Putative Neural Networks and Antecedents of Pediatric Anxiety in the Fetal, Neonatal, and Infant Periods.

Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent psychiatric disorders in youth and are associated with profound individual impairment and public health costs. Research shows that clinically significant anxiety symptoms manifest in preschool-aged children, and correlates of anxiety symptoms are observable in infancy. Yet, predicting who is at risk for developing anxiety remains an enduring challenge. Predictive biomarkers of anxiety are needed before school age when anxiety symptoms typically consolidate into diagnostic profiles. Increasing evidence indicates that early neural measures implicated in anxiety and anxious temperament may be incorporated with traditional measures of behavioral risk (i.e., behavioral inhibition) to provide more robust classification of pediatric anxiety problems. This review examines the phenomenology of anxiety disorders in early life, highlighting developmental research that interrogates the putative neurocircuitry of pediatric anxiety. First, we discuss enduring challenges in identifying and predicting risk for pediatric anxiety. Second, we summarize emerging evidence for putative neural antecedents and networks underlying risk for pediatric anxiety in the fetal, neonatal, and infant periods that represent novel potential avenues for risk identification and prediction. We focus on evidence examining the importance of early amygdala and extended amygdala circuitry development to the emergence of anxiety. Finally, we discuss the utility of integrating developmental psychopathology and neuroscience to facilitate future research and clinical work.

Phenoscreening: a developmental approach to research domain criteria-motivated sampling.

BACKGROUND: To advance early identification efforts, we must detect and characterize neurodevelopmental sequelae of risk among population-based samples early in development. However, variability across the typical-to-atypical continuum and heterogeneity within and across early emerging psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders represent fundamental challenges to overcome. Identifying multidimensionally determined profiles of risk, agnostic to DSM categories, via data-driven computational approaches represents an avenue to improve early identification of risk. METHODS: Factor mixture modeling (FMM) was used to identify subgroups and characterize phenotypic risk profiles, derived from multiple parent-report measures of typical and atypical behaviors common to autism spectrum disorder, in a community-based sample of 17- to 25-month-old toddlers (n = 1,570). To examine the utility of risk profile classification, a subsample of toddlers (n = 107) was assessed on a distal, independent outcome examining internalizing, externalizing, and dysregulation at approximately 30 months. RESULTS: FMM results identified five asymmetrically sized subgroups. The putative high- and moderate-risk groups comprised 6% of the sample. Follow-up analyses corroborated the utility of the risk profile classification; the high-, moderate-, and low-risk groups were differentially stratified (i.e., HR > moderate-risk > LR) on outcome measures and comparison of high- and low-risk groups revealed large effect sizes for internalizing (d = 0.83), externalizing (d = 1.39), and dysregulation (d = 1.19). CONCLUSIONS: This data-driven approach yielded five subgroups of toddlers, the utility of which was corroborated by later outcomes. Data-driven approaches, leveraging multiple developmentally appropriate dimensional RDoC constructs, hold promise for future efforts aimed toward early identification of at-risk-phenotypes for a variety of early emerging neurodevelopmental disorders.

Infants' gaze exhibits a fractal structure that varies by age and stimulus salience.

The development of selective visual attention is critical for effectively engaging with an ever-changing world. Its optimal deployment depends upon interactions between neural, motor, and sensory systems across multiple timescales and neurocognitive loci. Previous work illustrates the spatio-temporal dynamics of these processes in adults, but less is known about this emergent phenomenon early in life. Using data (n = 190; 421 visits) collected between 3 and 35 months of age, we examined the spatio-temporal complexity of young children's gaze patterns as they viewed stimuli varying in semantic salience. Specifically, we used detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to quantify the extent to which infants' gaze patterns exhibited scale invariant patterns of nested variability, an organizational feature thought to reflect self-organized and optimally flexible system dynamics that are not overly rigid or random. Results indicated that gaze patterns of even the youngest infants exhibited fractal organization that increased with age. Further, fractal organization was greater when children (a) viewed social stimuli compared to stimuli with degraded social information and (b) when they spontaneously gazed at faces. These findings suggest that selective attention is well-organized in infancy, particularly toward social information, and indicate noteworthy growth in these processes across the first years of life.

Examining criterion-oriented validity of the Repetitive Behavior Scales for Early Childhood (RBS-EC) and the Video-Referenced Rating of Reciprocal Social Behavior (vrRSB).

Improved characterization of quantitative traits and dimensionally distributed complex behaviors during toddlerhood may improve early identification of autism spectrum disorder and related neurodevelopmental disorders. Parents of 205 community-ascertained toddlers (age: mean = 20.2, SD = 2.6 months) completed the Repetitive Behavior Scales for Early Childhood (RBS-EC) and the Video-Referenced Rating of Reciprocal Social Behavior (vrRSB), with longitudinal follow-up of behavioral assessments and/or another round of parent-report questionnaires. Criterion validity was examined both concurrently and longitudinally using the Infant Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (ITSEA) as a criterion anchor. Reciprocal social behavior as measured by the vrRSB was significantly associated with social competence as measured by the ITSEA, longitudinally and concurrently. Reciprocal social behavior was not associated with the externalizing subscale on the ITSEA, providing evidence of discriminant validity. Higher-order repetitive behaviors (restricted interests; rituals and routines) as measured by RBS-EC subscales were associated with the dysregulation and internalizing subscales of the ITSEA, longitudinally and concurrently. All RBS-EC subscales (excepting repetitive motor) were associated concurrently and longitudinally with the dysregulation subscale of the ITSEA. We report evidence of criterion-oriented and discriminant validity for the constructs/domains captured by the RBS-EC and vrRSB. These instruments may be particularly useful in characterizing dimensional variability across the typical-to-atypical continuum.

Restricted, Repetitive, and Reciprocal Social Behavior in Toddlers Born Small for Gestation Duration.

OBJECTIVE: To characterize restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) and reciprocal social behaviors (RSBs) in a large sample of toddlers who represent a range of birth weights and gestation durations. STUDY DESIGN: A battery of questionnaires characterizing demographic information and measuring RRBs and RSBs were completed by parents of toddlers between the ages of 17-26 months (n = 1589 total; n = 98 preterm). The association between birth weight and/or gestation duration and the primary outcome measures (RRBs and RSBs as ascertained through the Repetitive Behavior Scale for Early Childhood and the Video-Referenced Rating of Reciprocal Social Behavior) were tested by using hierarchical multivariate multiple regression. RESULTS: Toddlers born preterm and full term did not differ on RRBs or RSBs. However, there were significant associations between birth weight percentile for gestation duration (BPGD) and RRBs (ß = -2.1, P = .03), above and beyond the effects of age, sex, and vocabulary production. Similarly, there was a significant association between BPGD and RSBs (ß = -1.8, P = .02), above and beyond the effects of age, sex, and vocabulary production. CONCLUSIONS: These findings demonstrate that BPGD better predicted putative antecedents of adverse psychological outcomes-specifically, RRBs and RSBs-than gestation duration alone. These findings provide insight to the link between preterm birth and suboptimal behavioral/psychological outcomes and suggest that high birth weight, which may reflect a more optimal intrauterine environment, may serve as a protective factor irrespective of gestation duration.