Neural activity is altered by childhood trauma exposure and varied by sex in typically developing youths during sustained attention-to-response tasks (SART)

It is well recognized that adults with exposure to childhood traumas are at risk of developing psychopathology and executive dysfunction. However, how these executive function deficits emerge following trauma exposure has not been widely examined. We hypothesized that children exposed to a higher number of early childhood traumas would show reduced amplitude and longer latency in cortical response in executive brain regions during tasks requiring sustained attention and inhibition, compared to children with fewer or no such experiences. We report data from sixty-five typically developing youths 9–15 years of age who self-reported exposure to childhood traumatic events, not including abuse. Brain signals were recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG) while the sustained attention-to-response task (SART) task was performed. Task-activated sources were localized, and we investigated brain function by measuring amplitude and latency of task-evoked cortical response in frontal and parietal cortices with repeated-measures analysis of variance. A significant (p < 0.05) main effect revealed higher amplitude in low-trauma compared to high-trauma groups in ventral anterior cingulate cortex and superior parietal cortex. Further, significant three-way interactions (trauma/hemisphere/peaks) were found in amplitude of superior parietal cortex and response latency of precentral cortex during the correct No-Go condition, and simple effect analysis showed significantly shorter latency in the high-trauma group in right precentral cortex at P1. Significant interactions of trauma with sex and hemisphere were revealed in multiple pre-selected regions, such that high exposure to trauma affected cortical processing in male and female groups differently. The results may explain sex-specific vulnerability and risks of exposure to childhood trauma with increased susceptibility to psychopathology in adulthood.