Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pulliam, Haley R.
• Springer, Seth D.
• Rice, Danielle L.
• Ende, Grace C.
• Johnson, Hallie J.
• Willett, Madelyn P.
• Wilson, Tony W.
• Taylor, Brittany K.

Titel

Neurotoxic effects of home radon exposure on oscillatory dynamics serving attentional orienting in children and adolescents

Ist Teil von

• NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.), 2024-04, Vol.292, p.120606-120606, Article 120606

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ScienceDirect Journals (5 years ago - present)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Environmental exposures are linked to cognitive outcomes like attention deficits.•Home radon exposure has seldom been studied for its effects aside from cancer.•We assessed links between home radon exposure and neural dynamics serving attention.•Youths with greater radon exposure showed atypical attention network recruitment.•Radon exposure also robustly modulated expected neurodevelopmental trajectories. Radon is a naturally occurring gas that contributes significantly to radiation in the environment and is the second leading cause of lung cancer globally. Previous studies have shown that other environmental toxins have deleterious effects on brain development, though radon has not been studied as thoroughly in this context. This study examined the impact of home radon exposure on the neural oscillatory activity serving attention reorientation in youths. Fifty-six participants (ages 6–14 years) completed a classic Posner cuing task during magnetoencephalography (MEG), and home radon levels were measured for each participant. Time-frequency spectrograms indicated stronger theta (3–7 Hz, 300–800 ms), alpha (9–13 Hz, 400–900 ms), and beta responses (14–24 Hz, 400–900 ms) during the task relative to baseline. Source reconstruction of each significant oscillatory response was performed, and validity maps were computed by subtracting the task conditions (invalidly cued – validly cued). These validity maps were examined for associations with radon exposure, age, and their interaction in a linear regression design. Children with greater radon exposure showed aberrant oscillatory activity across distributed regions critical for attentional processing and attention reorientation (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex). Generally, youths with greater radon exposure exhibited a reverse neural validity effect in almost all regions and showed greater overall power relative to peers with lesser radon exposure. We also detected an interactive effect between radon exposure and age where youths with greater radon exposure exhibited divergent developmental trajectories in neural substrates implicated in attentional processing (e.g., bilateral prefrontal cortices, superior temporal gyri, and inferior parietal lobules). These data suggest aberrant, but potentially compensatory neural processing as a function of increasing home radon exposure in areas critical for attention and higher order cognition.