Children's Brains & Poverty - Fetal Listening - Maternal Brain - Huntington's & Nancy Wexler

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Jun 13, 2026, 6:53:49 AM (3 days ago) Jun 13

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/11/nx-s1-5849937/child-brain-development-stress-sleep-neighborhood-economics

Socioeconomic factors are becoming 'biologically embedded' in children's brains

Jon Hamilton

The most powerful factors affecting a child's brain development involve socioeconomic opportunities, according to a study in the journal Science.

The analysis of more than 2,300 9- and 10-year-olds found that environmental factors ranging from household income to education to neighborhood quality are associated with brain differences that can clearly be seen in MRI scans.

The researchers also found that preteens who'd grown up in neighborhoods with lower incomes and limited social support had brain differences associated with less sleep and more stress.

"Something is going on in these neighborhoods," says Scott Marek, the study's first author and an assistant professor of radiology at WashU School of Medicine. "We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded."

The research "highlights the fact that the environment in which we grow up and live has powerful impacts on our brain," says Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.

It also challenges earlier research that focused on links between brain development and factors like IQ and mental health.

Those factors do appear to have a small influence on brain development, says Dr. Nico Dosenbach, an author of the new study and a professor at WashU Medicine in St. Louis.

"But socioeconomics was, by a wide margin, absolutely the dominant variable," Dosenbach says.
© 2026 npr

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imaging/iqs-link-to-brain-structure-function-in-children-may-be-a-mirage/

IQ’s link to brain structure, function in children may be a mirage

By Natalia Mesa

IQ is one of the most-studied traits in brain imaging studies. And yet it has a weaker relationship with brain structure and function in children than socioeconomic status does, according to a study published today in Science.

The apparent link between IQ and brain differences largely disappears once socioeconomic status is controlled for, the findings suggest. The results point to the importance of factoring in socioeconomic status in analyses of brain imaging datasets, the researchers say.

“If you’re not properly taking into account [socioeconomic status]” in brain imaging experiments, “you’re going to fool yourself,” says study investigator Nico Dosenbach, professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dosenbach and his colleagues analyzed MRI scans and behavioral data from roughly 12,000 children aged 9 to 10 in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, looking for correlations between measures of brain structure and function and 649 psychological, health, social and environmental factors. Socioeconomic variables—such as household income and where the child lives—were the most strongly associated with functional connectivity and cortical thickness.

Differences in socioeconomics account for 16 percent of the variance in functional connectivity across the participants, the study found, which is among “the largest effects that are seen in these kinds of studies,” says Russ Poldrack, professor of psychology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. Socioeconomic status accounted for roughly 13 percent of the variance in cortical thickness. Sleep and screen time are also strongly linked to these brain features, although not as strongly as socioeconomics.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/songs-prep-unhatched-finches-hot-world

Songs prep the brains of finches yet to hatch for a hot world

By Jake Buehler

Zebra finches sing their young into biological preparedness for hot weather, all before they even leave the egg.

As the heat punishes sun-crisped Australian woodlands, the adult birds make a rapid, peeping “heat call”. That signal kicks off genetic changes in unhatched baby zebra finches’ brains, researchers report June 11 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The tune appears to give developing finches a physiology-bending forecast, giving them a leg up once they emerge into the broiling conditions on the other side of the eggshell.

A decade ago, behavioral ecologist Mylene Mariette and her colleagues discovered that exposure to these heat calls in the egg shortly before hatching changed how the chicks dealt with high temperatures. They grew more slowly, preferred warmer places to nest and seemed better equipped to handle hot conditions.

But it was unknown how hearing a simple song could trigger these kinds of physical and behavioral changes in the young. Mariette, of Deakin University in Waurn Ponds, Australia and Julia George, a neuroscientist at Clemson University in South Carolina wanted to know if the songs might initiate changes in the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain heavily involved in regulating metabolism and responses to heat.
Hear the finch’s heat-induced call

This high-pitched, rapid peeping is the “heat call” of the Australian zebra finch. The effect the call has on the developing brain’s vasculature may make the chicks more resilient against heat stroke. But the impact lasts the birds’ entire life.

https://www.thetransmitter.org/pregnancy/maternity-induces-lasting-gene-expression-changes-in-mouse-brains/

Maternity induces lasting gene-expression changes in mouse brains

By Amber Dance

Motherhood creates a broad swath of long-term gene-expression changes in the brains of mice, according to a new study. This is accomplished by dopamine attaching to the histones of neuronal DNA and regulating gene expression, particularly in the hippocampus.

The findings suggest that “pregnancy fundamentally changes the body and brain,” says study investigator Jennifer O’Chan, instructor in neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “And these are long-lasting effects.”

Similar patterns of gene regulation appeared in postmortem samples from five women of varying ages who had all given birth in their past, O’Chan and her colleagues found. The work thus adds to a small but growing body of research on neurological changes linked to pregnancy, birth and parenting.

“The maternal brain is woefully understudied, and so the molecular profiling that they do … it’s really an enormous resource,” says Catherine Peña, assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, who was not involved with the paper.

Of 11 brain regions linked to maternal behaviors in mice that the group studied, the dorsal hippocampus and associated subiculum—together called the dorsal hippocampal formation—exhibited the greatest differences in gene expression between virgin mice and those that experienced the full spectrum of motherhood, from mating to weaning. This region doesn’t usually top the list of brain areas linked with maternity, says Robert Froemke, professor of neuroscience at New York University Langone Health, who wasn’t involved in the study. But hippocampal functions such as temporal sequencing and synthesizing different memory streams could certainly apply to pup-rearing, he says. “It’s not a total surprise, but it’s fair to say this paper makes me consider its importance more strongly.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/science/researcher-huntingtons-disease-wexler.html

The Researcher Who Didn’t Want to Know

By Gina Kolata

On my second visit with Nancy Wexler at her Manhattan apartment, she had a gift for me. It was a copy of her newly published memoir, “My Life, My Science: Pursuing a Cure for Huntington’s Disease.”

It had been signed with a stamp of her signature — she isn’t able to sign it herself. Nor could she rise from her brown faux-leather recliner to greet me — she can’t get up unassisted. Speaking requires effort. She can manage at most a few badly slurred words or phrases or, with great difficulty, a short sentence.

On that bright windy afternoon, Nancy and her sister, Alice Wexler, sat side by side in recliners, their backs to windows that offered a stunning view of the Hudson River far below. Alice lives in California, but she visits Nancy every other month.

At age 80, Nancy Wexler has Huntington’s disease, a dreaded brain disease that destroys a person’s ability to control movements. There is no treatment. There is no cure.

The disease is inherited: Nancy’s grandfather, three uncles and mother had it. Alice, however, does not: If a parent has Huntington’s, each child has a 50 percent chance of getting it. Their mother attempted suicide, a path that others with the disease have chosen, but ultimately died from Huntington’s.

Nancy is not just any Huntington’s disease patient. For decades, she led a research effort in a remote area of Venezuela that found the gene responsible for Huntington’s. That work yielded a blood test that enable at-risk people to find out if they are destined to get the disease. In honor of this work, Nancy has garnered numerous accolades and prizes, including a Lasker award, among the most prestigious in science. She devoted her life to understanding what it’s like to be at risk for Huntington’s disease, what it’s like to have it.