Research report: Prenatal disaster exposure alters associations between uncinate fasciculus development and adolescent emotional-behavioral functioning

Adolescents whose mothers endured Superstorm Sandy while pregnant show a strikingly different relationship between the development of a key emotion-regulation brain pathway and their day-to-day behavior, according to a new study of 64 children from a New York City birth cohort.

The research team, led by Rebecca M. Lee of the City University of New York and colleagues including Yoko Nomura and A. Duke Shereen, drew participants from the Stress in Pregnancy (SIP) study, a longitudinal project that recruited mothers at obstetric clinics at New York-Presbyterian and Mount Sinai hospitals between 2009 and 2014. Children whose mothers were pregnant when the storm struck New York City in October 2012 were classified as Superstorm Sandy stress-exposed, while controls were born either before the storm, between January 2011 and October 2012, or after it, between September 2013 and October 2014. Of 66 re-recruited participants, two were dropped—one exposed child whose MRI showed artifacts in the prefrontal lobe and one unexposed child who could not complete the behavioral assessment—leaving a final analytical sample of 64 adolescents aged 9 to 14, of whom 12 had been exposed prenatally.

Each participant underwent diffusion magnetic resonance imaging on a Siemens Prisma 3T scanner at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, with the acquisition and processing pipeline harmonized to the protocol used by the large Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Before scanning, the children practiced in a mock MRI simulator that reproduced scanner sounds and demonstrated the blurring caused by head motion, and they watched a movie during the scans to help them stay still. Real-time motion correction with volumetric navigators, eddy current correction, and field inhomogeneity correction were applied before the diffusion data were fitted to a tensor model to yield fractional anisotropy, or FA, a measure commonly used as a proxy for white matter microstructure. The uncinate fasciculus was segmented in each subject using a probabilistic atlas-based tractography approach, and the researchers focused on mean FA within this tract, treating higher FA as an indicator of developmental maturation.

Behavioral functioning was assessed through parent questionnaires. The Child Behavior Checklist captured internalizing problems, such as anxiety, depression, and withdrawal, and externalizing problems, such as rule-breaking, aggression, and impulsivity. The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, Second Edition, provided separate indices of behavioral regulation, covering the ability to monitor and inhibit behavior, and emotional regulation, covering the ability to shift between demands and control emotional responses. On both instruments, higher raw scores indicate greater dysregulation. Parents rated the children, on average, within the developmentally normative range, with scores equivalent to age- and sex-normed T-scores of around 50 in both exposed and unexposed groups.

The statistical strategy tested three hypotheses in sequence. General linear models first asked whether prenatal storm exposure was independently associated with uncinate fasciculus FA or with any of the four behavioral outcomes, adjusting for age, sex, and handedness. A mediation model then tested whether the tract’s microstructure carried the effect of exposure onto adolescent functioning, with direct and indirect effects estimated through nonparametric bootstrapping using 5,000 simulations. Finally, the models tested whether exposure moderated—that is, changed the strength of—the association between FA and behavior. Because the sample, and particularly the exposed group, is small, the authors designated the analysis exploratory and applied a false discovery rate correction of 15 percent, considering adjusted p-values below 0.15 significant, a deliberately permissive threshold intended to surface weaker patterns rather than confirm definitive effects.

The main-effect analyses came back null. Prenatal storm exposure showed no significant association with externalizing problems, internalizing problems, behavioral regulation, or emotional regulation, with p-values ranging from 0.57 to 0.93, and no significant difference in left or right uncinate fasciculus FA between exposed and unexposed adolescents. The mediation models likewise found no significant direct or indirect pathways linking exposure, tract microstructure, and adolescent outcomes. Demographically, the two groups were well matched: there were no significant differences in maternal ethnicity, race, marital status, family socioeconomic status, normative lifestyle stress, traumatic stress, maternal depression, or maternal anxiety, and the children did not differ in age at scanning, sex, or handedness.

The moderation results told a different story. Prenatal Superstorm Sandy-related stress moderated the association between bilateral uncinate fasciculus FA and behavioral regulation, with interaction coefficients of -1.50 on the left and -1.73 on the right and FDR-adjusted p-values of 0.11 and 0.10, and it moderated the association with emotional regulation even more strongly, with coefficients of -2.02 on the left and -2.56 on the right and adjusted p-values of 0.12 and 0.07. In every case, higher FA was associated with better regulation, and that positive association was significantly stronger among the storm-exposed adolescents than among their unexposed peers. For the exposed group, a well-developed uncinate fasciculus went hand in hand with better behavioral and emotional regulation, whereas among unexposed adolescents the association was weaker or not statistically apparent. No other significant associations emerged.

The authors interpret this pattern as preliminary evidence of positive adaptation rather than deficit. Yet the same Sandy cohort has previously yielded an unexpected result: exposed children showed larger brain volumes in regions involved in motor control and reward-based decision making.

A plausible mechanism, the authors suggest, involves the biology of maternal stress. Maternal stress responses trigger cascades of cortisol and inflammatory signals that can cross the placental barrier and the blood-brain barrier, potentially altering fetal development in stress-sensitive circuits such as the frontolimbic system. The study’s quasi-experimental design, which exploited the storm’s unforeseen timing to assign exposure naturally, lends temporal precision and reduces the selection bias typical of observational research, and the harmonized imaging protocol strengthens reliability across facilities.

The authors are careful to frame the conclusions as hypothesis-generating. The exposed group contains only 12 adolescents, a size that precluded analysis of trimester-specific effects and may have limited power to detect main effects of exposure, potentially explaining why significant results emerged only in the interaction analyses. The cross-sectional design cannot establish the direction of causation between white matter maturation and behavior, the behavioral outcomes rest on parent report rather than adolescent self-report, and postnatal factors such as parenting style, family support, and the broader environment were not modeled, even though prior research suggests supportive postnatal environments may be associated with more favorable outcomes among prenatally stressed children.

Subject of Research: How prenatal Superstorm Sandy stress exposure moderates the association between uncinate fasciculus white matter development and adolescent emotional-behavioral regulation

Article Title: Prenatal disaster exposure alters associations between uncinate fasciculus development and adolescent emotional-behavioral functioning

Article References: Lee, R. M., DeIngeniis, D., Olsen, C., O’Neill, S., Nomura, Y., & Shereen, A. D. (2026). Prenatal disaster exposure alters associations between uncinate fasciculus development and adolescent emotional-behavioral functioning. Discover Neuroscience, 21(1), Article 120. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13064-026-00350-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13064-026-00350-w

Keywords: prenatal stress, Superstorm Sandy, uncinate fasciculus, diffusion MRI, fractional anisotropy, adolescence, emotional regulation, behavioral regulation, frontolimbic circuitry, neurodevelopment, birth cohort, climate disasters