Effects of neurodevelopment and the home environment on behavioural outcomes following preterm birth

<h3>Biography</h3> Dr Lucy Vanes is a lecturer in Neuroscience and Psychology at the Department of Neuroimaging, King’s College London. She completed her PhD in 2017, studying the neural correlates of treatment resistant schizophrenia, after which she conducted postdoctoral research focusing on both infant and adolescent brain development and its association with later psychopathology. She was awarded a King’s Prize Fellowship in 2022 to investigate neurodevelopmental trajectories of psychiatric risk and resilience. Dr Vanes has a particular interest in identifying neuroimaging and sociodemographic predictors of transdiagnostic risk for psychopathology in neurodevelopmentally vulnerable populations, such as children born very preterm. Premature birth is associated with an increased risk of childhood psychopathology, psychomotor delay, and cognitive deficits. However, the extent to which these developmental problems are amenable to environmental factors or determined by neurobiology at birth remains unclear. This talk will focus on several studies investigating the role of neonatal brain development as well as the home environment in shaping behavioural outcomes in toddlerhood and childhood following preterm (&lt;37 weeks gestation) and very preterm (&lt;33 weeks gestation) birth. Drawing on large infant neuroimaging datasets with behavioural follow-up in childhood, we show that neonatal brain structure and function, as well as their longitudinal development over the first weeks of life, are predictive of specific aspects of behavioural development in children born preterm. Furthermore, cognitively stimulating parenting and socio-economic deprivation were found to be differentially associated with psychopathology and psychomotor development following preterm birth, highlighting the importance of modifiable aspects of the home environment in fostering resilience in this vulnerable population.