Childhood Adversity and Pace of Brain Development: A Systematic Review

Prior work has identified significant impacts of early adversity and stress on child brain development, including volumetric growth, functional connectivity, and neural activation. Neurodevelopment occurs rapidly throughout early childhood, continues into early adulthood, and establishes the foundation for lifelong cognition and socioemotional development. The developing brain is susceptible to environmental influences, particularly in early life, and it is critical to better understand which environmental experiences confer developmental risk and how adversity influences the pace and extent of brain maturation. Research has also found associations between brain metrics and mental health outcomes (e.g., smaller hippocampus conferring greater risk for developing PTSD after trauma exposure; larger amygdala associated with depression). Despite this growing body of work, socioeconomic disadvantage is often studied separately from other adversities and the influence of adversity on brain maturation trajectories is less commonly studied and findings have been mixed. Thus, a systematic review that includes a wide range of early adverse experiences and focuses exclusively on structural brain growth over time is needed to elucidate the nature of these relationships and identify important areas of focus for future work based on gaps in the literature. This systematic review will determine how adverse childhood experiences influence the pace of brain maturation across development, whether the pace of brain maturation depend on the type or timing of early adversity, and at what point in development differences in brain maturation trajectories are the largest. We expect to find differences in the pace of brain maturation in children and adolescents who have experienced adversity compared to those who have not. The literature is unclear regarding whether maturation is faster or slower for those exposed to early adversity and likely differs based on age. Our exploratory hypothesis is that adversity exposure will be associated with flatter maturational trajectories (i.e., less growth). However, in early life, this maturation may appear accelerated (i.e., early pruning and cortical expansion) but less maturation and growth across childhood and adolescence, with differences becoming more pronounced with age over time. Prior evidence has identified and validated distinct dimensions of adversity (i.e., deprivation, threat, unpredictability) that differentially relate to neural development. Thus, we expect to find maturational differences based on the type of adversity. Specifically, one recent study (Beck et al., 2025) found that neglect experiences were associated with slower maturation whereas threat experiences were associated with faster maturation. However, as with the pace of development, the literature on differences in adversity type and maturation is mixed and an emerging area of interest. Hence, the present review is necessary to clarify these complex relationships.