Aug 2026· Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging· 0 citations· 71 references
Medicine
Abstract
Background
Variation in pubertal maturation relative to same-age, same-sex peers (pubertal timing) has been linked to increased risk for depressive symptoms during adolescence. This developmental period is also characterized by substantial reorganization of functional brain networks. However, how pubertal timing relates to resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) changes and depression risk remains unclear.
Methods
We examined pubertal timing and rsFC associations in 9-11-year-old preadolescents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Pubertal timing was estimated using a puberty age gap approach based on parent-reported physical development. Linear mixed-effects and Bayesian multilevel models were used to assess cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between pubertal timing and rsFC across large-scale functional brain networks. We also tested whether rsFC differences explained associations between pubertal timing and later depressive symptoms.
Results
Earlier pubertal timing was associated with heterogeneous rsFC patterns, with stronger and more widespread effects in females. Earlier pubertal timing was associated with rsFC increases and decreases across sensory-motor and association networks in females, whereas in males, associations were more limited and localized to sensorimotor and cerebellar systems. Longitudinally, earlier pubertal timing in females predicted reductions in rsFC at the 2-year follow-up, with no significant associations in males. rsFC differences did not explain the pubertal timing and later depressive symptoms association.
Conclusions
Pubertal timing is associated with sex-specific patterns of brain functional connectivity during early adolescence, with greater heterogeneity and broader network involvement in females. These findings suggest that pubertal maturation contributes to early reorganization of functional brain networks, although these changes did not explain subsequent depressive symptoms.
Altered reward sensitivity (either heightened or blunted) has been observed in a range of psychiatric disorders. Understanding neurodevelopmental pathways associated with individual differences in reward sensitivity will therefore help inform prevention and intervention efforts for a range of disorders. In this Registered Report, we used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ study (ABCD study®), from the baseline, 2-year follow-up, and 4-year follow-up waves of data collection, when participants were on average aged 10, 12, and 14 years old, respectively, to examine these pathways using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our aims were to examine whether striatal connectivity with the default mode network and cingulo-opercular network were associated with individual differences in reward sensitivity, and whether effects differed by sex and pubertal stage. Results indicated that reward sensitivity was positively associated with ventral striatum connectivity with the default mode network and negatively associated with ventral striatum connectivity with the cingulo-opercular network. In addition, adolescents with higher connectivity between the dorsal striatum (the caudate and putamen) and the cingulo-opercular network exhibited greater declines in reward sensitivity with pubertal development. Overall, increased striatal connectivity with the cingulo-opercular network may be associated with decreased reward sensitivity due to heightened regulation of reward-related function by the cingulo-opercular network, which plays a role in self-regulation and cognitive control.
J. R. Swartz, Marjolein E. A. Barendse, S. L. Taylor et al.· Developmental Cognitive Neur...· 0 citations
Pubertal maturation drives brain development, yet longitudinal evidence linking it to resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) in early adolescence remains limited, and adolescent mental-health trajectories differ by sex, motivating sex-specific analyses. In a general-population cohort (255 adolescents scanned at Time 1; 68 girls and 70 boys with analysable two-wave data), we examined longitudinal change in rs-FC between ages ~11.5 and ~13.6 years, separately by sex. Whole-brain analyses were applied without predefined regions of interest, using principal component analysis (PCA) as a data-driven screen and network-based statistics (NBS) to localize subnetworks associated with pubertal stage (Tanner stage). Among girls, Tanner breast stage at Time 2 was significantly associated with the fingerprint stability (within-individual similarity) of whole-brain rs-FC. NBS identified a subnetwork positively associated with Tanner breast stage, linking the thalamus to visual, auditory, and motor areas and the prefrontal operculum to frontoparietal association areas, with the PCA screen converging on thalamic involvement. No comparable associations were observed in boys. These findings suggest that the level of pubertal maturation is associated with the longitudinal stability of large-scale brain networks in girls.
Susumu Morita, K. Kasai, Masahiro Kiyota et al.· Neurosciences research· 0 citations
Whether pubertal timing across the ages of 8–15.5 years was associated with diurnal cortisol slope, the cortisol awakening response, total morning cortisol, and total daily cortisol output at the age of 15.5 years was sought.
Risk for depression increases during adolescence, reflecting a constellation of cascading interactions between affective, biological, and cognitive factors. Drift diffusion modeling (DDM) can clarify the cognitive mechanisms underlying risk for depression by decomposing cognitive task performance into latent components, such as drift rate, boundary separation, and non-decision time. However, limited research has applied DDM to adolescent depression or examined whether these cognitive processes interact with pubertal timing, a key biological risk factor. Participants were 103 racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse youth (Mage = 12.58, 48.5% female) who completed cognitive and affective inhibitory control tasks as well as self-report measures of pubertal development and depressive symptoms. DDM parameters were derived using the EZ diffusion model, and moderation analyses tested whether DDM parameters interacted with pubertal timing to predict depressive symptoms. Earlier pubertal timing was associated with greater depressive symptoms across all models. Boundary separation, but not drift rate or non-decision time, significantly interacted with puberal timing in both the Stroop and Emotional Stroop tasks. Specifically, earlier development was associated with higher depressive symptoms only for youth with high boundary separation, potentially reflecting more cautious or effortful decision-making styles. These findings suggest that both cognitive and biological vulnerabilities both contribute to risk for depression during early adolescence. By identifying some of the specific latent decision-making processes associated with depressive symptoms, DDM may provide insight into cognitive features of depression like rumination, indecision, and increased error monitoring.
Kelly R Barry, Natasha Chaku, L. Hoyt· Research on Child and Adoles...· 0 citations
The association between irregular cycles and depression, and between long cycles and depression and anxiety, strengthened significantly with increasing gynaecologic age, while symptom burden associations were consistent throughout the post-menarcheal period.
Sushma Marla, S. Gangaraju, Josh Nguyen et al.· European Child and Adolescen...· 0 citations
Entropy is a novel brain measure that holds important information about brain flexibility and functioning, with promise for informing brain development in adolescence, as it has been shown to change across the lifespan. However, little is known about how it changes during the critically important phase of pubertal development, which kickstarts a period of broad neural reorganization and restructuring. This proof-of-concept cross-sectional study examined associations between fMRI signal entropy and early pubertal development in a large, diverse sample of children. Data (N = 6838; 49.6% male; ages 8.92-11.08) was drawn from the first wave of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Sample entropy was calculated on the time series of the resting-state fMRI signals for every grayordinate (i.e., cortical vertex and subcortical voxel). Parent-reported pubertal development (approximated Tanner stage) and salivary hormone levels (dehydroepiandrosterone; estradiol; testosterone) were correlated with sample entropy across the whole brain. The patterns of association between sample entropy and pubertal stage/hormone levels were inspected for males and females separately. Findings indicated pubertal development was associated with higher levels of resting state fMRI signal entropy, specifically in the occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes. Associations were apparent in females across most pubertal metrics. For males the constrained range of pubertal development may in part account for weaker associations observed. Further, adjustment for variables associated with early timing of pubertal development (socioeconomic status, body mass index) reduced the strength of puberty-entropy associations for both sexes. Longitudinal research is needed to confirm the associations between sample entropy and puberty, to evaluate whether stronger associations emerge as more males enter puberty in earnest, and to disentangle potential confounds.
Kirsten M. P. McKone, Donovan J. Roediger, Stefanie L. Sequeira et al.· Developmental Cognitive Neur...· 0 citations
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