The brain grows and shrinks throughout life

The health record has several pages dedicated to monitoring height and weight as children grow. What if he finds the same curve mkhna ? So have Jacob Seidlitz, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and more than 200 other researchers around the world. Thanks to a collective effort, they were able to collect more than 120,000 different MRI brain scans covering all life stages: from fetus Until the hundredth birthday.

Collect MRI images around the world

This set of brain images is unique and was not created specifically for this study. It would have been very expensive and very long. Therefore, Jacob Seidlitz and his colleagues were able to draw on the international scientific community by asking researchers around the world who have published a scientific study involving brain MRI to share their data with them. The initiative was enthusiastically welcomed by researchers who agreed to collaborate. The number of MRIs collected is impressive, despite everything, the selection is not entirely comprehensive. It suffers from a lack of diversity, which limits the generalizability of the results.

according to Article published in temper nature, only three data sets come from the continents of Africa and South America, which represent about 1% of the total data set. The rest concerns mainly white people, European or American, and city dwellers. Thus, the scientists behind the project regard this first version of the growth curve as a draft that must be improved upon.

Tracking brain development over time

Although imperfect, the schema of brain development still offers unprecedented insight brain development according to age. From the MRI, four parameters can be extracted and correlated with age: the sound subordinate Theme Gray, white matter volume, cerebral ventricles volume, cortex thickness. While some parameters reach their maximum during childhood, such as cortex thickness or gray matter volume, white matter volume peaks only in adulthood. Increased ventricular volume associated with atrophy from the brain And it increases exponentially from the age of 40. In its final version, this growth curve can become a tool for monitoring the growth of children, like children in terms of height and weight.