Abstract #3286

Associations Between Maternal Depression and Infant Fronto-Limbic Connectivity

Emily Dennis¹, Ananya Singh², Conor Corbin², Neda Jahanshad², Tiffany Ho³, Lucy King³, Lauren Borchers³, Kathryn Humpreys⁴, Paul Thompson², and Iang Gotlib³

¹Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Mountain View, CA, United States, ²Imaging Genetics Center, Marina del Rey, CA, United States, ³Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology Laboratory, Stanford, CA, United States, ⁴Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, United States

Maternal depression is a well-documented risk factor for psychopathology in children; the origins of this association, however, are not well understood. We present preliminary analyses of 24 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 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, highlighting a possible neurobiological marker of the intergenerational transmission of risk for depression.

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