Mapping Continued Brain Growth and Gray Matter Density Reduction in Dorsal Frontal Cortex: Inverse Relationships during Postadolescent Brain Maturation

By Elizabeth R. Sowell, P. Thompson, K. Tessner, Arthur W. Toga. Journal of Neuroscience, 2001

982 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent in vivo structural imaging studies have shown spatial and temporal patterns of brain maturation between childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that are generally consistent with postmortem studies of cellular maturational events such as increased myelination and synaptic pruning. In this study, we conducted detailed spatial and temporal analyses of growth and gray matter density at the cortical surface of the brain in a group of 35 normally developing children, adolescents, and young adults. To accomplish this, we used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging and novel computational image analysis techniques. For the first time, in this report we have mapped the continued postadolescent brain growth that occurs primarily in the dorsal aspects of the frontal lobe bilaterally and in the posterior temporo-occipital junction bilaterally. Notably, maps of the spatial distribution of postadolescent cortical gray matter density reduction are highly consistent with maps of the spatial distribution of postadolescent brain growth, showing an inverse relationship between cortical gray matter density reduction and brain growth primarily in the superior frontal regions that control executive cognitive functioning. Inverse relationships are not as robust in the posterior temporo-occipital junction where gray matter density reduction is much less prominent despite late brain growth in these regions between adolescence and adulthood. Overall brain growth is not significant between childhood and adolescence, but close spatial relationships between gray matter density reduction and brain growth are observed in the dorsal parietal and frontal cortex. These results suggest that progressive cellular maturational events, such as increased myelination, may play as prominent a role during the postadolescent years as regressive events, such as synaptic pruning, in determining the ultimate density of mature frontal lobe cortical gray matter.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cc7f8891cf1ed5d22e74ff6fc57d1c23faf9048

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Pubertal hormones organize the adolescent brain and behavior. (2005, background): “These mechanisms include neurogenesis [88,97], apoptosis [77], growth of axonal projections and axon sprouting [11,22,68], myelination [12,76,135], dendritic elaboration and retraction [43,72], synaptogenesis [14,15], and synapse elimination [6,38,52,72], often resulting in modiWcations of the gross”
Structural Abnormalities in the Brains of Human Subjects Who Use Methamphetamine (2004, methodology): “These criteria, along with interrater reliability measures, have been described previously (Sowell et al., 2001), and the written anatomical pro-”
Frontal lobe and cognitive development (2002, result): “According to some recent imaging studies (Sowell et al., 1999, 2001), that increase continues beyond adolescence into young adulthood.”
Quantitative Assessment of Structural Image Quality (2017, background): “The extant literature indicates robust age-related cortical thinning in adolescence (Gennatas et al., 2017; Gogtay et al., 2004; Sotiras et al., 2017; Sowell et al., 2001, 2003, 2004; Tamnes et al., 2010; Vandekar et al., 2015).”
The teen brain: insights from neuroimaging. (2008, background): “[20] Sowell ER, Thompson PM, Tessner KD, Toga AW.”
Impulsive and Self-Conscious: Adolescents' Vulnerability to Advertising and Promotion (2005, background): “2002), worse visuospatial and delayed verbal memory (Sowell et al. 2001), and slower reaction time (Spear 2000).”
Adolescent risk taking, impulsivity, and brain development: implications for prevention. (2010, background): “The dramatic growth of developmental neuroscience in the last decade has produced remarkable findings regarding brain development during childhood and adolescence (Giedd et al., 1999; Sowell, Thompson, Tessner, & Toga, 2001).”
Development of the adolescent brain: implications for executive function and social cognition. (2006, background): “One such study of participants aged between 7 and 30 revealed that the loss of grey matter in the frontal cortex accelerated during adulthood between the early 20s and up to the age of 30 (Sowell et al., 2001).”
Anatomically related grey and white matter abnormalities in adolescent-onset schizophrenia. (2007, background): “Age-related changes in grey matter throughout normal adolescence are dynamic, with substantial thinning of cortical grey matter starting initially in primary areas and occurring later in the secondary cortices of the frontal and parietal lobes and finally in the temporal lobes (Giedd et al., 1999; S”
Longitudinal Mapping of Cortical Thickness and Brain Growth in Normal Children (2004, positive): “…time 1 by manually selecting anatomical landmarks in both scans; (9) measuring cortical thickness in millimeters averaged within a 15 mm sphere attached to each cortical surface point; and (10) estimating relative local brain growth measured at each cortical surface point (Sowell et al., 2001b ).”
Social cognitive development during adolescence. (2006, background): “At the same time, there is an increase in prefrontal cortex (PFC) and parietal cortex white matter (WM) density from puberty onset, throughout adolescence and into adulthood (Giedd et al., 1996; 1999; Reiss et al., 1996; Sowell et al., 2001; Barnea-Goraly et al., 2005; for more detailed reviews of s”