To decode future anxiety and depression, begin with a child’s brain

Neuroscientist M. Catalina “Cat” Camacho spends a lot of time playing with kids. They’re not her children, but participants in her research, which looks at how young brains learn to process emotions and how that development relates to mental health.

“Every kid is so different, and I love getting little insights into their worlds,” says Camacho, of Washington University in St. Louis. “You really do come to appreciate just how much kids grow in such a short amount of time.”

That realization years ago drew her into neuroscience. After Camacho, a first-generation college student, earned a bachelor’s degree, she worked in a laboratory imaging infants’ brains and was shocked at how quickly they changed. Now, she’s continuing that line of research by studying kids while playing games and watching movies with them, even going to their homes to understand their lives.

Camacho is especially interested in the overlap between cognitive development and mental health. “Anxiety and depression are just supercommon,” says Camacho, who now recognizes that her mom struggled with depression during Camacho’s childhood. That drives her research today, which she hopes can inform “how it is that we intervene and when and for who, so that we can best bolster mental health in general.”

TRANSCRIPT

Cat Camacho: I’m not sure how much folks know this, but our brains actually roughly double in size in just the first two years of life. And by the time you’re around eight years old, your brain’s at roughly adult-sized. The really big picture of how our early experiences and how all of those things are going to influence our later functioning really start early in those first eight years.

And it also happens to be the age that we know the least about.

I really love working with preschoolers and it’s because there’s so much social growth happening in such a short amount of time. A lot of those really early building blocks, so how kids in the preschool period, for example, are able to label their feelings, understand each other’s feelings or how they express their own emotions, all of those things are really strong predictors for later mental health.

There’s probably some neurodevelopmental signals that are there, too, that we just need to better understand. That can give us some nuance to those like behavioral signals and help us understand who is going to develop these symptoms and can we do any interventions that are tailored to help those individuals.

For me, there was a specific moment that made me want to be a neuroscientist — specifically versus just any other kind of scientist. I was working full-time in a research lab, and we had just started an infant imaging study, and it was my first time, like, imaging kids that young. And you could see — you didn’t have to do any measurements or any processing of the images, you could just see changes in those brains, like in those kids month to month.

And that was just mind blowing to me. Just like how much our brains grow in such a short amount of time. And considering that, you know, we think that, like, mental health problems are all issues that can be traced back to differences in our brains. It just really spoke to me that, wow, we really need to be understanding how this works. Like, how does all this wiring come together and how do our experiences change this? And so to me, it was just like an aha moment of like, I need to study the brain specifically. That’s what’s going to help me understand what’s going on.

It’s really important to me that we try and understand the actual lived experiences of kids. And oftentimes as neuroscientists, we try to, you know, constrain and reduce complexity as much as possible. But I think the problem with specifically social neuroscience is that when we reduce that complexity, we also lose, in essence, what we’re actually studying. And so we try to, as much as possible, get out of the lab, like do observations at home or try to make what we have in lab more naturalistic and more complex. So it’s actually what kids are really experiencing in their day-to-day lives.

MRIs are extremely expensive, as machines they are expensive to upkeep. They’re usually centralized as a result, you know, so you’ll have a certain number of MRIs inside this giant university or hospital network. And so that already, just in terms of geography, limits who it is who you’re actually studying. So kids are more rural or less resourced places aren’t getting included in those studies.

And then adding in the actual act of going into an MRI. Like if you’re a three-year-old who’s never had to be imaged before, especially if you’re a kid with anxiety, like it’s a lot that we’re asking them to do. Personality can bias then, like, who actually ends up getting studied. And it’s something that I talk to my colleagues about a lot, is just like the kids I’m most interested in are the ones who don’t end up in my studies.

And that’s part of why we really are pushing for more child-friendly ways of imaging kids.

The study that we have going on in my lab right now, half of the kids are being imaged using that device. And all it is is a cap. So they just put on this little cap, and it shines light on the surface of their scalp, and it’s using that light to then measure changes in blood flow on the surface of the cortex.

So they don’t need to get into a big machine. They don’t have to, like, go through this whole process of being like ready to go in. They can just sit, watch a movie wearing a hat. And it’s so much more accessible, especially for more anxious kids.

I am so excited about this next generation of scientists. Like, I think that this generation is going to produce so many important breakthroughs that are going to help move the needle. I’m really excited about the new technologies coming about. So like I mentioned diffuse optical tomography earlier, which I really think is going to be a game changer, especially in studying kids who are at high risk or who are already symptomatic even before age eight.

And so being able to actually include everybody in our neuroimaging studies and being able to really understand how they, in particular, are experiencing things, I think is going to be so valuable moving forward. So I think despite all the things that we’re up against, there’s a lot to look forward to in the next 10 years.