Associations Between Maternal Depression and Infant Fronto-Limbic Connectivity

Maternal depression is a well-documented risk factor for psychopathology in children. The origins of this association, however, are not well understood. Noninvasive imaging methods such as MRI can be used to assess infant brain development and examine associations between maternal depression and neurobiological correlates of risk for psychopathology in early life. Here, we present preliminary analyses on 24 6 month old infants using a multi-shell diffusion MRI sequence optimized for imaging infant white matter, along with a novel tract clustering and identification workflow, TractStat. We examine the association between maternal depressive symptoms, measured by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, and infant white matter organization in the uncinate fasciculus (UF). Infants whose mothers report experiencing more severe depressive symptoms have lower fractional anisotropy of the right UF, suggesting a possible neurobiological marker of the intergenerational transmission of risk for depression.