Inflammation-related aberrations in beta and gamma oscillatory dynamics serving attention processing in typically developing youth

Attention is a critical cognitive ability that impacts everyday functioning and is subserved by multispectral neural oscillatory dynamics spanning extended frontoparietal brain networks. Throughout childhood and adolescence, attention networks are highly plastic as they undergo rapid and dynamic maturation. Concurrently, this period is marked by heightened vulnerability to the consequences of low-grade inflammation, which is known to impact attention networks in adults but has been seldom explored in youth. The current cross-sectional study sought to characterize the links between low-grade inflammation and neural dynamics serving attention processing in childhood and adolescence. A total of 100 youth ages 8-15 years (<i>M</i> = 12.21 years, <i>SD</i> = 2.27; 50 males, 50 females) completed a visuospatial attention task during magnetoencephalography and also provided a saliva sample from which we quantified biomarkers of inflammation. We found significant inflammation-related increases in beta (18-24 Hz) responses during the task in classical top-down attention control regions (βs = -0.36 to -0.32, <i>P</i>s < 0.001 to 0.002). Additionally, we found inflammation-related decreases in gamma (70-88 and 66-82 Hz) responses in regions commonly implicated in bottom-up attention processes (βs = -0.34 and -0.33, <i>P</i>s < 0.001 and 0.002). Taken together, our findings suggest decreased neural efficiency in top-down attention control systems, and atypical disengagement of bottom-up resources as a function of increasing low-grade inflammation in typically developing youth. These effects may be reflective of excitotoxicity that is commonly cited as a result of neuroinflammatory processes, though future work is needed to more clearly elucidate the nature of these aberrant oscillatory responses.