ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN CHILDHOOD ADVERSITY AND RESTING-STATE FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY IN THE UK BIOBANK

Experiences of childhood adversity are major risk factors for subsequent vulnerability to psychopathology. Neurodevelopmental research suggests that specific brain regions may be particularly sensitive to childhood adversity exposure. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear. Our aim was to address this challenge by applying an epidemiologically-inspired population-scale approach, using UK Biobank-derived functional connectivity data. Normalized partial connectivity coefficients were transformed into connection strength and deconfounded for demographic, mental health, and scanning-related covariates. Associations between childhood adversity dimensions and functional connectivity were tested using generalized linear models, with false discovery rate correction applied across nodes. The primary analysis was conducted in approximately 40k participants and excluded re-scanned individuals; a replication sample comprised participants scanned at a subsequent imaging wave (approximately 3k). Initial analyses showed associations primarily between emotional adversity and connectivity involving default mode, salience, attentional, limbic, and cerebellar networks. Effect sizes were small, and replication at the level of individual connections was limited. However, associations involving emotional adversity and default mode network connectivity showed consistency across imaging waves and appeared robust to additional adjustment for depressive and anxiety scores. Together, these preliminary findings suggest that adversity-related differences in functional connectivity may reflect modest and potentially reproducible whole-brain patterns. Ongoing analyses will further assess robustness under alternative confound specifications and sources of individual variability. Clarifying the reproducibility and heterogeneity of these network-level patterns may help inform future mechanistic studies of adversity-related risk.