Traumatic stress load and stressor reactivity score associated with accelerated gray matter maturation in youths indexed by normative models

Understanding how traumatic stress affects typical brain development during adolescence is critical to elucidate underlying mechanisms related to both maladaptive functioning and resilience after traumatic exposures. The current study aimed to map deviations from normative ranges of brain gray matter for youths with traumatic exposures. For each cortical and subcortical gray matter region, normative percentiles of variations were established using structural MRI from typically developing youths without any traumatic exposure ( n = 245; age range = 8–23) from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC). The remaining PNC participants with neuroimaging data ( n = 1129) were classified as either within the normative range (5–95%), delayed (>95%) or accelerated (