The Impact of Socioeconomic Status on White Matter Network Organization and General Cognitive Ability in Adolescents

Poster Session D - Monday, April 15, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Jaden Dilda^1,2, Julie Tseng², Amy S Finn¹, Anne L Wheeler^1,2, Donald J Mabbott^1,2; ¹University of Toronto, ²The Hospital For Sick Children

Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with the development of general cognitive ability; however, the biological underpinnings of this relationship are still not understood. To test whether white matter network organization mediates the relationship between SES and general cognitive ability in adolescents we constructed white matter connectomes and extracted multiple measures of SES for 219 cases from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Graph-theory based metrics of whole brain white matter network organization were produced and general cognitive ability was estimated using NIH toolbox measures. No significant mediation effect of white matter network organization metrics on the relationship between SES and general cognitive ability was observed. Network clustering was associated with general cognitive ability and financial stability and trauma history were associated with network efficiency. Only males showed an association between food and housing security and network clustering and modularity. Males also exclusively showed an association between network clustering and general cognitive ability. These findings suggest that different aspects of SES have unique impacts on white matter network development and cognition that do not impact all children equally. To test the stability of these findings, further processing and analysis will be conducted on the rest of the approximately 11,000 participants available through the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study.

Topic Area: THINKING: Development & aging