Racial Microaggressions, Neural Vigilance Circuitry and PTSD Outcomes in Youth Victims of Violence - Project Summary An estimated 70% of youth experience a violent assault before the age of 18, which significantly increases the risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), compared to experiencing other traumatic events. Black youth are vulnerable in that they additionally experience racial discrimination, which research has shown increases the risk of PTSD symptoms post-trauma in adult samples, yet this remains understudied in youth. Microaggressions, a covert, subtle, and sometimes unintentional form of racial discrimination, have especially been related to adverse mental health outcomes in adults. Additionally, because of their brief and subtle nature, microaggressions are particularly related to increased vigilance, which is associated with heightened activity of the amygdala (a key region in the neurobiological threat circuitry) and connectivity with other regions, such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and thalamus. Increased vigilance also increases the risk of PTSD symptoms. Thus, while individual links between racial discrimination, vigilance circuitry, and PTSD symptoms have been studied, there has not been a comprehensive model to integrate these constructs, nor have they been studied in adolescence, a time of increased vulnerability for psychopathology. Moreover, microaggressions as a specific type of racial discrimination have been understudied, and distinguishing between their acute and long-term effect remains unclear. This study will address such gaps through the following two aims: 1) Defining the mediating role of neural vigilance circuitry in the impact of previous microaggressions on PTSD symptom severity one year after the assault and 2) Examining the effect of experiencing concurrent and ongoing microaggressions on long-term mental and brain health outcomes during recovery from trauma. 100 Black youth will be recruited from the Children’s Wisconsin Emergency Department, a Level One Trauma Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, soon after experiencing a violent assault. Two weeks after the assault, participants will undergo a fMRI scan and self-report experiences of microaggressions and symptoms of PTSD; the same data will be collected 3 months and 12 months later. Neuroimaging data will be pre-processed, and the functional connectivity of the amygdala and dACC and the amygdala and thalamus will be separately analyzed. Mediation analyses will be conducted to examine the mechanistic role of the neurobiological vigilance circuitry in mediating the relationship between previous microaggressions and non-remitting PTSD symptoms (Aim 1). Regression analyses will investigate the impact of cumulative experiences of microaggressions (during the first year of recovery) on the brain’s vigilance circuitry and PTSD symptoms one year after the assault (Aim 2). Findings will allow for the investigation of a possible mechanism that links experiences of microaggressions to PTSD symptoms. This will not only increase the basic science understanding these mechanisms, but also inform additional targets for interventions that consider how Black youth’s lived experiences of racial microaggressions can shape their recovery post-trauma.
