Language and reading skills in school-aged children and adolescents born preterm are associated with white matter properties on diffusion tensor imaging
Graphical abstract
Highlights
► Language and reading measures are associated with white matter properties in children born preterm. ► The white matter network for language and reading was bilateral and widely distributed. ► Decoding skills were most strongly associated with fractional anisotropy in the corpus callosum. ► Verbal IQ and syntactic comprehension were most strongly associated with a right ventral pathway.
Section snippets
Background
Approximately 13% of the children in the United States are born prematurely (Allen, 2008), and these children are at elevated risk of neurodevelopmental disability (Fletcher et al., 1997, Hack, 2006, Msall and Tremont, 2002, Ornstein et al., 1991, Rose and Feldman, 1996, Rose et al., 2009, Strang-Karlsson et al., 2010). Among those born before 32 weeks gestation or weighing less than 1500 g, major disabilities, including cerebral palsy, sensory impairments, and/or intellectual disability affect
Participants
Participants were 9–16 years old and enrolled in the Palo Alto CA site of a larger multi-site study of prematurity outcomes (N=100) (Lee et al., 2011b, Loe et al., 2011, Loe et al., 2012). This study reports on participants who underwent MRI scanning at Stanford University. The Stanford University institutional review board approved this study. A parent provided informed consent; participants provided assent.
Preterm subjects were born at<36 weeks gestation with birth weight<2500 g. Controls were
Behavioral results and overall DTI results
There were no statistically significant group differences in the language and reading scores in this sample of children by independent t-tests (Table 1).
Associations between the FA-skeleton and language and reading scores
In the preterm group only, voxelwise analysis of the entire FA-skeleton with scores from language and reading tasks showed positive associations with FA for four measures: verbal IQ, linguistic processing speed, syntactic comprehension, and decoding. The regions of significant positive correlation for the different measures overlapped. There
Summary of results
Four language and reading measures—verbal IQ, linguistic processing speed, syntactic comprehension, and decoding—were associated with areas of the FA-skeleton in the preterm group in the voxelwise analysis. Contrary to the hypotheses, we found that language and reading measures were not associated with FA in the full-term group in the voxelwise analysis. A bilateral and widely distributed network of tracts was associated with the measures in the preterm group. The network included 22 clusters
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, RO1 HD046500 to Heidi M. Feldman; and by the Clinical and Translational Science Award 1UL1 RR025744 for the Stanford Center for Clinical and Translational Education and Research (Spectrum) from the National Center for Research Resources, National Institutes of Health. We thank the children and families who participated in our study. We thank
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