Development of functional and structural connectivity within the default mode network in young children

By Kaustubh Supekar, Lucina Q. Uddin, Katherine E. Prater, Hitha Amin, Michael D. Greicius, Vinod Menon. NeuroImage, 2010

551 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Functional and structural maturation of networks comprised of discrete regions is an important aspect of brain development. The default-mode network (DMN) is a prominent network which includes the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), medial temporal lobes (MTL), and angular gyrus (AG). Despite increasing interest in DMN function, little is known about its maturation from childhood to adulthood. Here we examine developmental changes in DMN connectivity using a multimodal imaging approach by combining resting-state fMRI, voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging-based tractography. We found that the DMN undergoes significant developmental changes in functional and structural connectivity, but these changes are not uniform across all DMN nodes. Convergent structural and functional connectivity analyses suggest that PCC-mPFC connectivity along the cingulum bundle is the most immature link in the DMN of children. Both PCC and mPFC also showed gray matter volume differences, as well as prominent macrostructural and microstructural differences in the dorsal cingulum bundle linking these regions. Notably, structural connectivity between PCC and left MTL was either weak or non-existent in children, even though functional connectivity did not differ from that of adults. These results imply that functional connectivity in children can reach adult-like levels despite weak structural connectivity. We propose that maturation of PCC-mPFC structural connectivity plays an important role in the development of self-related and social-cognitive functions that emerge during adolescence. More generally, our study demonstrates how quantitative multimodal analysis of anatomy and connectivity allows us to better characterize the heterogeneous development and maturation of brain networks.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49fa0b588a9069647ee02e59d5a18325698ba6a3

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Citations in the corpus

The Conscious Id (2013, background): “It undergoes significant ontogenetic development (Supekar et al., 2010), it underwent significant evolutionary expansion (Van Essen & Dierker, 2007), and its connectivity has been found to relate to personality (Adelstein et al.”
Imaging brain development: The adolescent brain (2012, result): “…networks, such as the default mode network (the network of brain regions that are active during baseline), have been reported during adolescence across several studies employing different analytic approaches (Fair et al., 2008; Jolles et al., 2011; Lopez-Larson et al., 2011; Supekar et al., 2010).”
Linking Structure and Function in Macroscale Brain Networks. (2020, unknown): “More broadly, individual differences in structure–function coupling provide a new opportunity to quantify the effects of manipulations and perturbations, such as cognitive tasks [83,85], development and aging [81,86,87], neurological and psychiatric diseases [70,88], and lesions [54,89,90].”
Development of large-scale functional networks from birth to adulthood: a guide to neuroimaging literature (2017, background): “…areas (and indeed, connectivity within other cognitive RSNs) continues to strengthen from early childhood throughout development, especially with respect to long-range anterior-posterior links (de Bie et al., 2012; Fair et al., 2008; Sato et al., 2014; Sherman et al., 2014; Supekar et al., 2010).”