Imagine we could characterize neurobiological vulnerability to perinatal mood disorders (PMADs)…even before conception🤯? At the TReNDS Lab, we’re building a multimodal dataset following individuals at elevated risk for PMADs from preconception through postpartum.🧠🤰Check out our preprint!
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doi.org
✨Excited to share that our new preprint, "Mapping developmental patterns of intrinsic timescale", is now available on bioRxiv!!
📚 doi.org/10.64898/202...
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a powerful tool to study white matter maturation. In our new preprint, we process and distribute a new resource of >24,000 ABCD dMRI scans using open source tools! We then evaluate how methods shape inferences about development.
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🍄 Our new living systematic review and meta-analysis on psilocybin for depression is out now in Nature Mental Health. Here's what we found and the open science infrastructure we built to support it 🧵
Open-Access Link: rdcu.be/fbU5V
🍄 Our new living systematic review and meta-analysis on MDMA for PTSD is now live on medRxiv. Here's what we found and how we built upon our open science infrastructure to support it 🧵
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
Noemí Rubau
doi.org
Excited to share a new preprint that examines how adversity exposure across development is associated with subcortical-cortical structure-function coupling and youth mental health! 🧠
Thread below: 🧵⬇
Nature Mental Health - This study presents a living systematic review and open-data meta-analytic database from 15 randomized controlled trials examining the effects of psilocybin treatment on...
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) has emerged as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generating considerable enthusiasm in the field. However, rapidly changing evid...
We think of white matter as the highways of the brain. But when we followed development along those highways, we were surprised. The journey is more complex than we thought. My final PhD paper, “Two Axes of White Matter Development”, is now out in @natcomms.nature.com! 🛣️🧠✨
🔗 bit.ly/wm2axes
How much does the childhood environment shape the brain?
In our new preprint, we study the exposome (300+ environmental exposures) and link it to white matter structure in 8,000+ kids. 🧠✨
🔗 Read the preprint: bit.ly/4wfsybZ
🧵 Thread below
Brooke Sevchik
Golia Shafiei
Steven Meisler
The childhood environment is critical for brain development. However, most neuroimaging studies examine individual environmental measures (e.g., socioeconomic status) or a limited set of exposures, obscuring how the combination of complex, real-world exposures jointly influence brain development. Here we investigated how white matter shape and tissue properties are linked to the childhood exposome, a multidimensional measure capturing over 300 environmental exposures. Using multi-shell diffusion MRI from 8,183 children (ages 9-10) in the ABCD study, we quantified microstructural and macrostructural properties across 62 person-specific white matter tracts. The exposome showed widespread and highly replicable associations with both white matter microstructure and macrostructure: more advantaged environments were associated with larger tract macrostructure and lower orientation dispersion. Principal component analysis revealed that the dominant axis of exposome-white matter covariation aligns with the cortical sensorimotor-association hierarchy, such that tracts spanning this hierarchy exhibit the strongest associations with the exposome. Multivariate models demonstrated that patterns of white matter features explained 25% of the variance in the exposome in unseen individuals. Notably, white matter-based prediction of cognition was markedly reduced after accounting for the exposome (~82% reduction in explained variance), indicating that brain-cognition associations overlap substantially with variance captured by the exposome. These findings generalized to independent data from the Healthy Brain Network (n=869), which differs substantially from ABCD in MRI acquisition, participant selection, and childhood environments. Together, these results suggest that white matter architecture strongly reflects the childhood environment. ### Competing Interest Statement A.A.B. has consulted for Octave Bioscience and holds equity in Centile Bioscience. RB is on the Advisory Board and holds equity in Taliaz Health. D.A.F. is a founder of Turing Medical. Any potential conflict of interest has been reviewed and managed by the University of Minnesota. D.A.F. is an inventor of the FIRMM Technology 2198 (FIRMM, real-time monitoring and prediction of motion in MRI scans, exclusively licensed to Turing Medical). Any potential conflict of interest has been reviewed and managed by the University of Minnesota. This research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (T32MH019112 to S.L.M.; R37MH125829 to D.A.F. and T.D.S.; 2R01MH112847 to R.T.S. and T.D.S.; R01MH120482 to T.D.S.; 2R01MH113550 to T.D.S.; R01MH123550 to R.T.S; F30MH138048 to K.Y.S.; RF1MH121868, RF1MH121867, RF1MH126699, R01AG060942, U19AG066567, R01EY033628, and R01EB027585 to A.R.; R01MH134886 to R.B.; T32MH016804 and T32MH018951 to V.J.S; R01MH133843 to A.A.B.; F31MH136685 to J.B.). S.L.M. was supported by the Hartwell Foundation (S.L.M.); G.S. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). A.S.K. is supported by a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. M.D.H. was supported by the German Research Foundation (project number 572317568). LMS was supported by a NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (#2507497).
Corticolimbic structure-function coupling is sensitive to childhood adversity and buffers adversity-related symptoms during development https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.22.696017v1