Investigating the association between socioeconomic status and hippocampal and amygdala grey matter volumes in young adults from the i-share cohort

This report will outline some of the research that I undertook during my internship at INSERM Bordeaux Population Health U1219. The internship lasted six months between September 2022 and March 2023 as part of my final 30 credits of my Master’s in Data Analytics for Business at ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management. In this internship I was responsible for statistical analysis and reviewing of the relevant literature working amongst a team of epidemiologists whose focus was the mental health of young people. I was given access to a large dataset of French university students to perform my analyses and carried these out primarily using R Studio. In the field of epidemiology, the goal of research is to provide suggestions for disease prevention methods. Preliminary research by my team found associations childhood SES and mental health, and to build on this, we decided to investigate associations of childhood SES and brain structure. Our research complements the growing literature surrounding importance of childhood SES on the brain in later life. This report investigates the association between the socioeconomic status in childhood and adolescence of these students and grey matter volumes in the amygdala and hippocampus. This data was collected by means of MRI scans and questionnaires. It is split into the introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. The introduction includes information about the company and my role, along with a brief overview of the limbic system, the hippocampus, and the amygdala, as well as the processes behind MRI and the acquisition of images. It also summaries the current literature in the domain. The methods section describes the cohort in more detail and the gives background information about key variables. It also goes into details about the statistical analysis including population description and model selection. There is also a note about ethical considerations. The results section presents the results of the analysis explained in the methods section, with demographic tables and summaries of the estimated models and key results stated. The discussion synthesises these results and compares them to the existing literature, with a perspectives section for ideas about further research and reflection on the findings. The conclusion gives a concise summary of the discussion.