Childhood Trauma and Neural Responses to Personalized Stress, Favorite-Food and Neutral-Relaxing Cues in Adolescents

Previous studies have found childhood trauma to be associated with functional and structural abnormalities in corticostriatal-limbic brain regions, which may explain the associations between trauma and negative mental and physical health outcomes. However, functional neuroimaging of maltreatment-related trauma has been limited by largely using generic and predominantly aversive stimuli. Personalized stress, favorite-food, and neutral/relaxing cues during functional magnetic resonance imaging were used to probe the neural correlates of emotional/motivational states in adolescents with varying exposure to maltreatment-related trauma. Sixty-four adolescents were stratified into high- or low-trauma-exposed groups. Cue-related measures of subjective anxiety and craving were collected. Relative to the low-trauma-exposed group, high-trauma-exposed adolescents displayed an increased activation of insula, anterior cingulate, and prefrontal cortex in response to stress cues. Activation in subcortical structures, including the hippocampus, was inversely correlated with subjective anxiety in the high-but not the low-trauma-exposed group. The high-trauma-exposed group displayed hypoactivity of cerebellar regions in response to neutral/relaxing cues. No group differences were observed in response to favorite-food cues. The relationship between trauma exposure and altered cortico-limbic circuitry may in part explain the association between childhood trauma and heightened vulnerability to emotional disturbances and risky behaviour. This may be particularly pertinent during adolescence when such difficulties often emerge. Further work is needed to elucidate the mechanism linking trauma to obesity.