Social Disparities in the Early Neurobiology of Stress

University Of California Berkeley, Berkeley CA

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Persistent societal inequalities in income and wealth--along with growing evidence of social disparities in rates of disease--have prompted renewed interest in understanding socioeconomic status effects (SES) on health outcomes within human populations. The psychiatric and biomedical morbidities of children show the same graded associations with social class, with childhood SES exerting delayed effects on adult health endpoints, as well. Evidence suggests that psychosocial processes--processes linking experiences of the mind with disorders of the body--may account for the greatest share of SES-related variance in both child and adult morbidities. A question of fundamental importance in health disparities research is therefore how the experiences of early life--particularly children's most immediate experiences within the lives of young families--get 'into the body', affecting the neurodevelopmental pathways and childhood trajectories leading toward health or disease. Chronic stressors embedded within such family-based experiences--maternal depression, father absence, and impoverished parent-child interactions--may program critical regulatory circuits in the developing brain and influence a child's risk for chronic biomedical and psychopathological disorders. In this R21 application, we propose a three-year program of scientific infrastructure development and pilot investigation, centered upon the mind-body processes that determine early social disparities in brain development. Specifically, we propose to explore linkages between social disparities in children's parenting experiences and the development and calibration of stress-responsive neural circuitry in the prefrontal cortex, the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system, and the corticotropin releasing hormone system. Discoveries linking social class differences in parenting to the development of neurobiological pathways could elucidate uncertainties about the origins of health disparities and identify promising directions for early and effective interventions. Based in the work of a multidisciplinary team--comprising a rich disciplinary alliance of behavioral medicine, economics, developmental psychology, social epidemiology, neuroscience and moral philosophy--the proposal outlines core support activities to advance the Consortium's research agenda and a series of pilot projects addressing neurobiological, developmental, epidemiological, and bioethical dimensions of social gradients in early development.