The Role of Puberty in the Developing Adolescent Brain

By Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Stephanie Burnett, Ronald E. Dahl. Human Brain Mapping, 2010

918 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Adolescence refers to the period of physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. The beginning of adolescence is loosely anchored to the onset of puberty, which brings dramatic alterations in hormone levels and a number of consequent physical changes. Puberty onset is also associated with profound changes in drives, motivations, psychology, and social life; these changes continue throughout adolescence. There is an increasing number of neuroimaging studies looking at the development of the brain, both structurally and functionally, during adolescence. Almost all of these studies have defined development by chronological age, which shows a strong—but not unitary—correlation with pubertal stage. Very few neuroimaging studies have associated brain development with pubertal stage, and yet there is tentative evidence to suggest that puberty might play an important role in some aspects of brain and cognitive development. In this paper we describe this research, and we suggest that, in the future, developmental neuroimaging studies of adolescence should consider the role of puberty. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Reproductive Medicine, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eba9c7d92363498e7ba53befd44d9f9fb51905e8

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Citations in the corpus

Frontostriatal Maturation Predicts Cognitive Control Failure to Appetitive Cues in Adolescents (2011, background): “Future research including measures of hormones may inform the relationship between striatocortical development, hormonal maturation, and behavioral outcomes (Blakemore, Burnett, & Dahl, 2010 ).”
The influence of puberty on subcortical brain development (2014, positive): “our study does not allowus to addresswhether the effects of puberty on structural brain growth are direct, via hormonal action on the brain tissue, or indirect, with the brain structure being shaped by how young people undergoing puberty may be treated differently in society than their less well-dev”
The dual systems model: Review, reappraisal, and reaffirmation (2015, neutral): “…studies also support the idea that, in addiion to having profound effects on brain structure [a topic not overed in the present article; see Blakemore et al. (2010) and mith et al. (2013) for reviews], pubertal development plays a role n developmental change in the sensitivity of the…”
Current research trends in early life stress and depression: review of human studies on sensitive periods, gene-environment interactions, and epigenetics. (2012, positive): “For example, estrogen levels are positively related to grey matter development in limbic regions specifically in female adolescents (for a review see, Blakemore et al., 2010).”
Imaging brain development: The adolescent brain (2012, background): “However, there is little understanding of the specific relationships between puberty and adolescent brain development (Blakemore et al., 2010b; Dorn, 2006).”
Developmental changes in endogenous testosterone have sexually‐dimorphic effects on spontaneous cortical dynamics (2023, background): “Longstanding animal and human work has demonstrated that pubertal hormones not only facilitate physical changes in secondary sex characteristics, but also induce major remodeling of neural circuitry and behavior during adolescence (Blakemore et al., 2010; Juraska et al., 2013; Sisk, 2016).”