A cross-species network science approach to childhood adversity
type: CreativeWork
description: The brain is an adaptive organ whose development is responsive to its early-life environment. This means that early experiences shape the biological substrates of lifelong health and well-being. Indeed, exposure to significant adversity in childhood increases the risk of a range of cognitive and behavioural difficulties later in life. Previous work has sought to understand this pathway by identifying neural correlates of exposure to poverty and violence, focusing particularly on the morphology of several key cortical and sub-cortical structures. However, region-specific correlations alone are not enough to generate a coherent account of the impact of child adversity. This thesis aims to address this gap by conducting a global, causal, and mechanistic investigation of the impact of adverse experiences in childhood, leveraging network science methods and computational modelling to accommodate more of the complexity inherent in the nature of childhood experiences and development. In Chapter 2, I aim to ascertain whether early-life adversity alters the development of rodent structural brain organisation. Using imaging data obtained from collaborators at Yale University, I first reconstruct the structural connectomes of a sample of mice, half of which were exposed to a paradigm of unpredictable postnatal stress. I then simulate the development of each connectome using generative network modelling, a computational approach that generates complex networks probabilistically based on a trade-off between the cost and value of connections. After validating the quality of the simulations, I conduct a case-control comparison of the models that best replicate the brain networks of adversity-exposed and unexposed mice, and explore potential implications of an observed difference in model parameters. I conclude that early adversity may cause an increase in stochasticity in the formation of the structural connectome. In Chapter 3, I aim to establish a global understanding of the nat…
abstract: The brain is an adaptive organ whose development is responsive to its early-life environment. This means that early experiences shape the biological substrates of lifelong health and well-being. Indeed, exposure to significant adversity in childhood increases the risk of a range of cognitive and behavioural difficulties later in life. Previous work has sought to understand this pathway by identifying neural correlates of exposure to poverty and violence, focusing particularly on the morphology of several key cortical and sub-cortical structures. However, region-specific correlations alone are not enough to generate a coherent account of the impact of child adversity. This thesis aims to address this gap by conducting a global, causal, and mechanistic investigation of the impact of adverse experiences in childhood, leveraging network science methods and computational modelling to accommodate more of the complexity inherent in the nature of childhood experiences and development. In Chapter 2, I aim to ascertain whether early-life adversity alters the development of rodent structural brain organisation. Using imaging data obtained from collaborators at Yale University, I first reconstruct the structural connectomes of a sample of mice, half of which were exposed to a paradigm of unpredictable postnatal stress. I then simulate the development of each connectome using generative network modelling, a computational approach that generates complex networks probabilistically based on a trade-off between the cost and value of connections. After validating the quality of the simulations, I conduct a case-control comparison of the models that best replicate the brain networks of adversity-exposed and unexposed mice, and explore potential implications of an observed difference in model parameters. I conclude that early adversity may cause an increase in stochasticity in the formation of the structural connectome. In Chapter 3, I aim to establish a global understanding of the nat…
author: Carozza, Sofia
language: eng
keywords: Brain development, Childhood adversity, Connectomics
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/e1f5b7bf-2af1-4e96-9c27-a62928ad39ed/download
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
date published: 2023-05-01
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:03Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.101823