The Development of Brain White Matter Microstructure
By Catherine Lebel, Sean C. L. Deoni. NeuroImage, 2018
546 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence, our brains undergo remarkable changes. Processes including myelination and synaptogenesis occur rapidly across the first 2–3 years of life, and ongoing brain remodeling continues into young adulthood. Studies have sought to characterize the patterns of structural brain development, and early studies predominately relied upon gross anatomical measures of brain structure, morphology, and organization. MRI offers the ability to characterize and quantify a range of microstructural aspects of brain tissue that may be more closely related to fundamental neurodevelopmental processes. Techniques such as diffusion, magnetization transfer, relaxometry, and myelin water imaging provide insight into changing cyto‐ and myeloarchitecture, neuronal density, and structural connectivity. In this review, we focus on the growing body of literature exploiting these MRI techniques to better understand the microstructural changes that occur in brain white matter during maturation. Our review focuses on studies of normative brain development from birth to early adulthood (˜25 years), and places particular emphasis on longitudinal studies and newer techniques that are being used to study microstructural white matter development. All imaging methods demonstrate consistent, rapid microstructural white matter development over the first 3 years of life, suggesting increased myelination and axonal packing. Diffusion studies clearly demonstrate continued white matter maturation during later childhood and adolescence, though the lack of consistent findings in other modalities suggests changes may be mainly due to axonal packing. An emerging literature details differential microstructural development in boys and girls, and connects developmental trajectories to cognitive abilities, behaviour, and/or environmental factors, though the nature of these relationships remains unclear. Future research will need to focus on newer imaging techniques and longitudinal studies to provide more detailed information about microstructural white matter development, particularly in the childhood years. Graphical abstract Figure. No caption available.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dba764107588f1ae80b9c08a3cdf09e2530ff041
Citations in the corpus
- The Neuroscience of Drug Reward and Addiction. (2019, unknown): “For example, the protracted period encompassing childhood and adolescence is characterized by increases in white matter volume and organization (195), while cortical gray matter shows a bimodal curve, increasing in volume until the onset of adolescence and then starting to decrease again (127).”
- Human auditory cortex preferentially tracks speech over music without explicit attention (2026, unknown): “…functional maturation of higher-order association cortex, including changes in cortical thickness, myelination, and long-range connectivity proceeds more slowly than primary areas (Corrigan et al., 2021; Gogtay et al., 2004; Huttenlocher, 1979; Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1997; Lebel & Deoni, 2018).”
- Considerations for conducting developmental neuroimaging research on mental health topics (2025, unknown): “Continued slower white matter changes after age 5 years are observed well into adulthood [56].”