ArticleEuropean child & adolescent psychiatry2026
Advancing prevention science for maltreatment exposed children: predicting mental health symptoms with a combined neurocognitive vulnerability index.
Article in European child & adolescent psychiatry, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Childhood maltreatment is an established risk factor for poor mental health, yet not all maltreatment-exposed children develop psychiatric symptoms. This highlights the need for individualised metrics to detect those at heightened risk. Previous efforts to develop such metrics have largely focused on maltreatment severity and aggregate demographic risk. Although neurocognitive alterations in domains like social cognition and reward processing have been linked to maltreatment, most research has examined cross-sectional group-level differences in isolated domains. This proof-of-concept study examines whether indexing combined neurocognitive vulnerability can help predict which maltreatment-exposed children are most at risk of future symptom increases. A sample (mean age = 12.8) of maltreatment-exposed children (MT = 85) and propensity-score matched (PSM) non-maltreated peers (NMT = 90) were assessed at baseline using five neurocognitive tasks spanning various domains of social cognition and reward processing. A combined neurocognitive vulnerability metric was created, and symptom changes were measured 1.5 years later for a subset of individuals (MT = 57, NMT = 47). Combined neurocognitive vulnerability predicted future mental health symptom increases in the maltreatment-exposed group, even after controlling for baseline symptoms and clinical status. Maltreatment-exposed children in the high neurocognitive vulnerability category had a 92.1% adjusted predicted probability of experiencing worsening symptoms over time. Furthermore, we found that children in the maltreatment-exposed group were more likely to fall into medium and high neurocognitive vulnerability categories than non-maltreated peers. These preliminary findings underscore the potential of using combined neurocognitive vulnerability metrics to identify maltreatment-exposed children at the increased risk for future mental health problems, supporting its role in prevention strategies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.