Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Pediatric brain health and neurodevelopment are influenced by various social factors. These factors, known as social determinants of brain health (SDBH) encompass various personal, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence health and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Recently, the emphasis has been placed on how social determinants of brain health (SDBH) and early life events could impact children's developmental outcomes. Despite growing interest in this area, there is no consensus on how to measure these factors, making it difficult to understand their impact on brain health. To fill the knowledge gap, we will conduct a review of the literature to summarize what social determinants have been the most used in the pediatric literature and which one have been associated with neurodevelopment. This review will follow the recommendations for Scoping Reviews to map existing published literature systematically. The literature search will be performed using the PUBMED and Google Scholar databases. Screening will be conducted by two reviewers and data will be charted, collated and narratively synthesized. Our preliminary search has led to the selection of 191 articles published between 2013 and 2023. This search allowed us to narrow down our research questions and keywords. The main literature review is currently ongoing and will include articles published since 1980 focusing on North American human pediatric (healthy and clinical) populations. Previous studies have focused mainly on maternal education and household income, but less is known about other social determinants such as neighborhood quality. We anticipated that brain health is shaped by a multi-dimensional overlapping of factors and this scoping review will summarize all the social determinants and identify which are most important for children's neurodevelopment.