CHICAGO, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) -- While neighborhood violence has been associated with adverse health effects on some youth, including sleep loss, asthma and metabolic syndrome, some other youth living in high-crime neighborhoods manage to avoid these effects.
To answer this resilience puzzle, researchers at Northwestern University (NU) tested 218 eighth-graders from the Chicago area for factors related to metabolic health, including obesity and insulin resistance. Assessing neighborhood factors, including murder rates, the researchers also conducted functional MRI (fMRI) scans of the brains of the study participants.
They found that resting-state connectivity within the central executive network (CEN) emerged as a moderator of adaptation. Across six distinct outcomes, a higher neighborhood murder rate was associated with greater cardiometabolic risk, but this relationship was apparent only among the youth who displayed lower CEN resting-state connectivity.
No such correlation was apparent in youth that displayed high-resting functional connectivity in the same brain network, the researchers said. The results suggest a role for the central executive network in adaptability and resilience to adverse events.
The study, due to its cross-sectional and observational design, cannot claim a causal link between neighborhood violence and health. A longitudinal, multi-wave study is needed to track neighborhood conditions, brain development and cardiometabolic risk across childhood to establish causality, the researchers hold.
Further study could lead to possible interventions, which preliminary evidence suggests could be "network training" programs to modulate the functional connectivity of the brain's CEN network. These network training programs can enhance "self-control, threat reappraisal and thought suppression" to lower at-risk teens' engagement in drug use, overeating and other reactions to such stress.
The study has been published in PNAS.
