RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Adolescent tuning of association cortex in human structural brain networks
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 126920
DO 10.1101/126920
A1 František Váša
A1 Jakob Seidlitz
A1 Rafael Romero-Garcia
A1 Kirstie J. Whitaker
A1 Gideon Rosenthal
A1 Petra E. Vértes
A1 Maxwell Shinn
A1 Aaron Alexander-Bloch
A1 Peter Fonagy
A1 Ray Dolan
A1 Peter Jones
A1 Ian Goodyer
A1 the NSPN consortium
A1 Olaf Sporns
A1 Edward T. Bullmore
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/12/126920.abstract
AB How does human brain organization change over the course of adolescence? Motivated by prior data on local cortical shrinkage and intracortical myelination, we predicted age-related changes in topological organisation of cortical structural networks. We estimated the structural correlation matrix from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures of cortical thickness at 308 regions in a sample of N=297 healthy participants, aged 14-24 years (inclusive). We used a novel sliding-window analysis to measure age-related changes in network attributes globally, locally and in the context of several community partitions of the network. We found that the strength of structural correlation generally decreased as a function of age. Association cortical regions demonstrated a sharp decrease in nodal degree (hubness) from 14 years, reaching a minimum at approximately 19 years, and then levelling off or even slightly increasing until 24 years. Greater and more prolonged age-related changes in degree of cortical regions within the brain network were associated with faster rates of adolescent cortical myelination and shrinkage. The brain regions that demonstrated the greatest age-related changes were concentrated within prefrontal modules. We conclude that human adolescence is associated with biologically plausible changes in structural imaging markers of brain network organization, consistent with the concept of tuning or consolidating anatomical connectivity between frontal cortex and the rest of the connectome.