Year: 2010
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The corpus callosum changes structurally throughout life, but most dramatically during childhood and adolescence. Even so, existing studies of callosal development tend to use parcellation schemes that may not capture the complex spatial profile of anatomical changes. Thus, more detailed mapping of callosal growth processes is desirable to create a normative reference. This will help to relate and interpret other structural, functional, and behavioral measurements, both from healthy subjects and pediatric patients. We applied computational surface-based mesh-modeling methods to analyze callosal morphology at extremely high spatial resolution. We mapped callosal development and explored sex differences in a large and well matched sample of healthy children and adolescents (n = 190) aged 5-18 years. Except for the rostrum in females, callosal thickness increased across the whole surface, with sex- and region-specific rates of growth, and at times shrinkage. The temporally distinct changes in callosal thickness are likely to be a consequence of varying degrees of axonal myelination, redirection, and pruning. Alternating phases of callosal growth and shrinkage may reflect a permanent adjustment and fine-tuning of fibers connecting homologous cortical areas during childhood and adolescence. Our findings emphasize the importance of taking into account sex differences in future studies, as existing developmental effects might remain disguised (or biased toward the effect of the dominant sex in unbalanced statistical designs) when pooling male and female samples.
Source: Journal of Neuroscience
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Language: English
Subfield: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Center for Research Resources, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Awards: G130320643, G1330507362, G143771443, PEDIATRIC STUDY CENTERS (PSCS) FOR A MRI STUDY OF NORMAL, G1757829149, G2045911221, G2382774797, G2671046062, G2713508169, Computational Anatomy and Multidimensional Modeling, G328544487, G347720180, Novel PDEs for Cortical Mapping and Analysis in Disease, G363710439, G3642348494, UCLA Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, G3863882080, G3868918485, PEDIATRIC STUDY CENTERS (PSCS) FOR A MRI STUDY OF NORMAL, PEDIATRIC STUDY CENTERS (PSCS) FOR A MRI STUDY OF NORMAL, G451214520, A Multidimensional Alzheimer's Disease Brain Atlas, G4660470923, General Clinical Research Center, Center for Computational Biology (CCB)(RMI), MRI STUDY OF NORMAL BRAIN DEVELOPMENT CLINICAL COORDINATING CENTER, A Multidimensional Alzheimer's Disease Brain Atlas, Computational Modeling of High-Field MR Images, PEDIATRIC STUDY CENTERS (PSCS) FOR A MRI STUDY OF NORMAL, PEDIATRIC STUDY CENTERS (PSCS)FOR A MRI STUDY OF NORMAL, G602052340, G610429368, G6303498173, G6460849299, G6644087359, G679527571, G6805418841, G690007806, DATA COORDINATING CENTER (DCC) FOR A MRI STUDY OF NORMAL, G8243396638, G98731164
OpenAlex ID: W2068393346