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CHICAGO, Nov. 28 (Xinhua) – While neighborhood violence has been badociated with adverse health effects for some young people, including sleep loss, asthma, and metabolic syndrome other young people from high-crime neighborhoods are able to avoid them.
To address this resilience problem, researchers at Northwestern University (NU) tested 218 grade eight students from the Chicago area for factors related to metabolic health, including obesity and depression. insulin resistance. By badessing neighborhood factors, including murder rates, the researchers also performed functional MRI scans of the brain of the study participants.
They found that connectivity between states of rest within the Central Executive Network (CEN) had emerged as a moderator of adaptation. . Out of six separate outcomes, a higher rate of murders in the neighborhood was badociated with increased cardiometabolic risk, but this relationship was apparent only among youth with lower CEN-state-of-rest connectivity.
No similar correlation was apparent among youth with high connectivity. functional connectivity in the same brain network, the researchers said. The results suggest that the central executive network plays a role in adaptability and resilience to adverse events
Due to its cross-sectional and observational design, the study can not claim a causal link between the neighborhood violence and health. The researchers argue that a longitudinal multi-wave study is needed to track neighborhood conditions, brain development, and cardiometabolic risk in childhood in order to establish causality.
Additional studies could lead to possible interventions, which preliminary evidence suggests could be "networking". programs to modulate the functional connectivity of the CEN brain network. These networked training programs can improve "self-control, threat re-evaluation and suppression of thoughts" to reduce the involvement of at-risk adolescents in drug use, over-consumption of food and alcohol. other reactions to such stress.
The study was published in PNAS.
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