Bradley Peterson

University of Southern California | USC

Infant fecal metabolomics can provide valuable insights into the associations of nutrition, dietary patterns, and health outcomes in early life. Breastmilk is typically classified as the best source of nutrition for nearly all infants. However, exclusive breastfeeding may not always be possible for all infants. This study aimed to characterize asso...

Background Whether and how psychotherapies change brain structure and function is unknown. Its study is of great importance for contemporary psychotherapy, as it may lead to discovery of neurobiological mechanisms that predict and mediate lasting changes in psychotherapy, particularly in severely mentally ill patients, such as those with chronic de...

The experience of ethnic, racial, and structural inequalities is increasingly recognized as detrimental to health, and early studies suggest that its experience in pregnant mothers may affect the developing fetus. We characterized discrimination and acculturation experiences in a predominantly Hispanic sample of pregnant adolescent women and assess...

Introduction: Patients with univentricular hearts undergo a three-stage surgical palliation, culminating in total caval-pulmonary connection (Fontan procedure), maximizing delivery of oxygenated blood to the systemic circulation. Prior brain research in this population has highlighted genetic predisposition, in-utero oxygen delivery, surgical insul...

The deleterious effects of adversity are likely intergenerational, such that one generation’s adverse experiences can affect the next. Epidemiological studies link maternal adversity to offspring depression and anxiety, possibly via transmission mechanisms that influence offspring fronto-limbic connectivity. However, studies have not thoroughly dis...

Introduction Repetitive, subconcussive events may adversely affect the brain and cognition during sensitive periods of development. Prevention of neurocognitive consequences of concussion in high school football is therefore an important public health priority. We aimed to identify the player positions and demographic, behavioral, cognitive, and im...

Identifying reliable indicators of cognitive functioning prior to age five has been challenging. Prior studies have shown that maternal cognition, as indexed by intellectual quotient (IQ) and years of education, predict child intelligence at school age. We examined whether maternal full scale IQ, education, and inhibitory control (index of executiv...

Importance: Few translational human studies have assessed the association of prenatal maternal immune activation with altered brain development and psychiatric risk in newborn offspring. Objective: To identify the effects of maternal immune activation during the 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy on newborn brain metabolite concentrations, tissue...

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: This study will collect multimodal and longitudinal data in adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder and healthy controls. A mixed effects random forest machine learning approach will be taken to develop a model that can predict individualized longitudinal OCD symptom burden. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Baseline resting state funct...

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Maternal health and exposures during pregnancy play a major role in shaping the neurodevelopment of our offspring—one influence is maternal immune activation (MIA). Here we explore the association of MIA during pregnancy and the developing human connectome through analysis of 46 markers of activation. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: 7...

Introduction: The false discovery rate (FDR) procedure does not incorporate the geometry of the random field and requires high statistical power at each voxel, a requirement not satisfied by the limited number of participants in imaging studies. Topological FDR, threshold free cluster enhancement (TFCE), and probabilistic TFCE improve statistical...

The anatomical changes that antidepressant medications induce in the brain and through which they exert their therapeutic effects remain largely unknown. We randomized 61 patients with Persistent Depressive Disorder (PDD) to receive either desvenlafaxine or placebo in a 12-week trial and acquired anatomical MRI scans in 42 of those patients at base...

Background Working memory deficits are thought to be a primary disturbance in schizophrenia. We aimed to identify differences in morphology of the hippocampus and amygdala in patients with schizophrenia compared with healthy controls (HCs), and in patients who were either neuropsychologically near normal (NPNN) or neuropsychologically impaired (NPI...

Background Higher prenatal ambient air pollution exposure has been associated with impaired neurodevelopment in preschoolers and school-aged children. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between prenatal ambient air pollution exposure and neurodevelopment during infancy. Methods This study examined 161 Latino mother-infant p...

BACKGROUND Use of smartphones and wearable biosensors has increased rapidly, with an estimated 87% of adult Americans currently carrying a smartphone and 20% using wearable sensors. These devices can continuously measure various aspects of behavior and physiology, while also collecting data that require user input (such as mood, context, and social...

Background: Smartphones and wearable biosensors can continuously and passively measure aspects of behavior and physiology while also collecting data that require user input. These devices can potentially be used to monitor symptom burden; estimate diagnosis and risk for relapse; predict treatment response; and deliver digital interventions in pati...

Obesity can result from excess intake in response to environmental food cues, and stress can drive greater intake and body weight. We used a novel fMRI task to explore how obesity and stress influenced appetitive responses to relatively minimal food cues (words representing food items, presented similarly to a chalkboard menu). Twenty-nine adults (...

Animal studies have shown that human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are important in early brain development, yet their roles have not been assessed in humans. The purpose of this study was to determine the associations of HMOs with MRI indices of tissue microstructure and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in infants. Mother–infant pairs (N = 20) w...

We are increasingly aware of the effects of ethnoracial stress on health, with emerging interest in the potential for intergenerational transmission before birth. Here, we investigate the effect of maternal prenatal discrimination and acculturation experiences on fetal growth, birth outcomes, and functional connectivity in the infant brain. In preg...

Background: Administration of the Einstein Neonatal Neurobehavioral Assessment Scale (ENNAS) can be time-consuming, and items can be highly correlated. We aimed to determine: (1) its factor analytic structure; (2) the validity of the factor structure; and (3) the associations of physiologic measures with factor scores. Methods: A factor analysis re...

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is highly familial, and the hippocampus and amygdala are important in the pathophysiology of MDD. Whether morphological markers of risk for familial depression are present in the hippocampus or amygdala is unknown. We imaged the brains of 148 individuals, aged 6 to 54 years, who were members of a three-generation fam...

The purpose of this qualitative study was to capture the perspectives of individuals representing an urban, predominantly Latinx community who are underresourced by mental health services about the use of telehealth to deliver mental health treatment. The COVID-19 pandemic required hospital- and community-based mental health programs to pivot to te...

Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor antidepressants alter functional activity in large expanses of brain regions. However, it is not clear how these regions are systemically organized on a connectome level with specific topological properties, which may be crucial to revealing neural mechanisms...

Background Prenatal exposure to air pollution disrupts cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development. The brain disturbances associated with prenatal air pollution are largely unknown. Methods In this prospective cohort study, we estimated prenatal exposures to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), and then...

Background Psychostimulants are frequently used to treat attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but side effects are common leading to many patients discontinuing treatment. Identifying neural mechanisms by which psychostimulants attenuate symptoms may guide the development of more refined and tolerable therapeutics. Methods We conducted...

Background Identifying the brain bases for phenotypic heterogeneity in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) will advance understanding of its pathogenesis and improve its clinical management. Methods We compared Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) indices and connectome measures between 77 ASD and 88 Typically Developing (TD) control participants. We also as...

Despite being an inert treatment, placebo has been repeatedly shown to induce the experience of automatic symptom relief, a therapeutic effect over which a person has no control. We tested whether a placebo that participants believed was an active drug would induce them to take action to overcome their symptomatic impairment, a self-efficacious rol...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Previous research has established an association between postnatal ambient air pollution (AAP) exposure and cognitive development in preschoolers and school-aged children. However, this association has not been examined during infancy, a critical neurodevelopmental window. The purpose of this study was to explore relationships b...

Animal studies have shown that exposure to excess sugar during the prenatal and postnatal periods may alter early brain structure in rat pups. However, evidence in humans is lacking. The aim of this study was to determine associations of maternal total and added sugar intake in pregnancy with early brain tissue organization in infants. Adolescent m...

Background Treatment of a child who has an anxiety disorder usually begins with the question of which treatment to start first, medication or psychotherapy. Both have strong empirical support, but few studies have compared their effectiveness head-to-head, and none has investigated what to do if the treatment tried first isn’t working well—whether...

Background Maternal prenatal stress is associated with worse socio-emotional outcomes in offspring throughout childhood. However, the association between prenatal stress and later caregiving sensitivity is not well understood, despite the significant role that caregiving quality plays in child socio-emotional development. The goal of this study was...

Objectives Animal studies have shown that exposure to zinc in the prenatal and postnatal periods is essential for brain structure and functioning in rat pups. Yet, no human studies have examined whether zinc is associated with brain tissue microstructure and metabolism in infants, the basis for neurodevelopmental outcomes. The primary aim of this s...

Resting functional MRI studies of the infant brain are increasingly becoming an important tool in developmental neuroscience. Whereas the test-retest reliability of functional connectivity (FC) measures derived from resting fMRI data have been characterized in the adult and child brain, similar assessments have not been conducted in infants. In thi...

Background: Prenatal air pollution exposure is associated with reductions in self-regulation and academic achievement. Self-regulation has been separately linked with academic achievement. Understudied, however, are the contributions of pollution exposure to inhibitory control, a facet of self-regulation, and whether pollution-related inhibitory c...

Objective Infants with Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) are at risk for developmental delays, though the mechanisms of brain injury that impair development are unknown. Potential causes could include cerebral hypoxia and cerebrovascular instability. We hypothesized that we would detect significantly reduced cerebral oxygen saturation and greater cere...

Childhood maltreatment (CM) is a known risk factor for adolescent pregnancy. Sleep disturbances and psychological distress, both common negative sequelae of CM, often co-occur during pregnancy, although directionality remains unclear. Furthermore, little is known about how CM affects sleep–distress associations during pregnancy. In pregnant adolesc...

Brain gray matter is organized in a manner with interconnected brain regions, resulting in a notable covariance pattern that recapitulates either the functional coactivation or structural connectivity of brain regions, which is believed to underpin psychiatric disorders such as depression. This study aimed to investigate whether and how antidepress...

Age and sex differences in brain metabolite concentrations in early life are not well understood. We examined the associations of age and sex with brain metabolite levels in healthy neonates, and investigated the associations between neonatal brain metabolite concentrations and developmental outcomes. Forty-one infants (36–42 gestational weeks at b...

Connectomics identifies brain networks in vivo in resting state functional MRI. However, the presence of noise produces spurious identification of brain networks, which have low test-retest reliability. A Network Based Statistics approach to network identification has been previously proposed that affords much better statistical power relative to B...

Precision medicine and biomarker development have become the prevailing paradigm for mental health research. Despite its conceptual elegance and dominance as a research framework, precision medicine has a very limited track record of demonstrable success thus far for mental illnesses, due in varying degrees to the complexity of both the brain and t...

Introduction: CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has transformed the treatment of relapsed/refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), inducing complete remission in 70-90% of patients. Importantly, 40% of patients receiving CD19 CAR T cell therapy develop immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (I...

Importance: Higher maternal prepregnancy body mass index (BMI; calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) is associated with adverse long-term outcomes for offspring, including obesity, poorer cognitive and social abilities, and increased risk of psychiatric disorders. Less clear is whether higher maternal BMI disrupts...

Background: Exposure therapy is the treatment of choice for anxiety disorders but requires people to confront feared situations and can be distressing. We tested the hypothesis that exposure without conscious awareness would reduce fear in participants with specific phobia by harnessing the neural circuitry supporting the automatic extinction of f...

Background Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is associated with aberrant limbic neural responses to emotional stimuli. We assessed how self-generated emotions modulate trial-by-trial limbic activity and whether this brain-emotion synchrony varies by familial MDD risk (regardless of personal MDD history) and neuroticism. Methods Participants (n=74, M...

Background: Our prior studies revealed that infant somatic growth is influenced by fructose in breast milk, and fructose in breast milk is increased in response to maternal sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) intake in lactation. It is unknown whether infant neurodevelopmental outcomes are also influenced by maternal SSBs in lactation. Objectives: To...

Resting functional MRI studies of the infant brain are increasingly becoming an important tool in developmental neuroscience. Whereas the test-retest reliability of functional connectivity (FC) measures derived from resting fMRI data have been characterized in the adult and child brain, similar assessments have not been conducted in infants. In thi...

Importance Increasing rates of illicit drug use during pregnancy may be associated with risk for long-term health problems in prenatally exposed children. Objective To identify the associations of prenatal exposure to illicit drugs with organization of the newborn brain. Design, Setting, and Participants For this cohort study, a volunteer sample...

Objectives Our prior studies have shown that maternal sugar-sweetened beverage and juice (SSBJ) consumption influenced breast milk fructose, and higher breast milk fructose was associated with greater infant growth. It is unknown whether maternal SSBJ consumption in lactation also influences infant neurodevelopment. The aim of this study was to det...

Prenatal maternal distress—an umbrella concept encompassing multiple negative psychological states including stress, anxiety, and depression—is a substantial prenatal exposure. Consistent across preclinical and human studies, the hippocampus displays alterations due to prenatal distress. Nevertheless, most prenatal distress studies do not focus on...

Background Infant cognitive development is influenced by maternal factors that range from obesity to early feeding and breast milk composition. Animal studies suggest a role for human milk oligosaccharide (HMO), 2’-fucosyllactose (2’FL), on learning and memory, yet no human studies have examined its impact on infant cognitive development relative t...

Background Risk for childhood psychopathology is complex and multifactorial, implicating direct and interacting effects of familial and environmental factors. The role of environmental neurotoxicants in psychiatric risk is of growing concern, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), common in air pollution. Prenatal PAH exposure is linked...

Genetic factors explain 60 percent of variance in reading disorder. Exposure to neurotoxicants, including polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), may be overlooked risk factors for reading problems. We used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to examine associations between prenatal PBDE concentrations and functional conne...

Introduction: CD19-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has revolutionized the treatment for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), inducing complete remission in 70-90% of highly refractory patients. Unfortunately, CAR-T cell therapy is associated with immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS) in 40% of...

Poor neighborhood quality (NQ) is associated with social withdrawal and low self-esteem, as well as increased symptoms of anxiety and depression. The majority of reports assessing the association between NQ and child mental health use Census data, which rely on objective components of neighborhood composition and cannot capture a resident’s percept...

Adolescence is a period of dramatic neural reorganization creating a period of vulnerability and the possibility for the development of psychopathology. The maturation of various neural circuits during adolescence depends, to a large degree, on one's experiences both physical and psychosocial. This occurs through a process of plasticity which is th...

Children ages 9-12 years face increasing social and academic expectations that require mastery of their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Little is known about the development of neural pathways integral to these improving capacities during the transition from childhood to adolescence. Among 234 healthy, inner-city male and female youth (species Ho...

Meta‐analyses have consistently shown a wide variety of psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions to yield similar effect sizes, suggesting the possibility that those interventions share common factors that account for the vast majority of variance in clinical outcomes. Although mediation analyses are needed to know definitively whether f...

Few studies have assessed the association of parental socioeconomic status (SES) with brain measures in neonates, at a time when exposure to the postnatal environment is minimal. Social support may buffer the adverse consequences of SES, and has been associated with better cognitive – emotional development in children. We studied the association of...

Background To assess whether patients with Persistent Depressive Disorder (PDD) have abnormal levels of N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA) and whether those levels normalize following treatment with the antidepressant medication duloxetine. Furthermore, we conducted post hoc analyses of other important brain metabolites to understand better the cellular and...

Antidepressant medications offer an effective treatment for depression, yet nearly 50% of patients either do not respond or have side-effects rendering them unable to continue the course of treatment. Mechanistic studies might help advance the pharmacology of depression by identifying pathways through which treatments exert their effects. Toward th...