Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ArticlesAnatomical MRI of the Developing Human Brain: What Have We Learned?
Section snippets
METHOD
The articles summarized were retrieved through Medline and included healthy subjects younger than 18 years of age (Table 1). Healthy is defined as either normal volunteers or, in some cases, nonpsychiatric patients. Twenty-two articles were included. Fifteen normative articles were excluded as they reported qualitative or area measures rather than quantitative or volumetric measures. The only exception was studies of the corpus callosum, as all relied on area measures. Thirty-five articles
Developmental Changes
Consistent with postmortem studies (Kretschmann et al., 1986), total brain size does not increase significantly after age 5. This relative stability of total brain volume belies a dynamic interplay of simultaneously occurring progressive and regressive events, with different regions following different time courses.
White matter volume increases significantly during childhood and into adulthood. This is probably related to ongoing myelination of axons by oligodendrocytes, following a pattern
DISCUSSION
While the reviewed reports describe an increase in brain volume over the first few years, significant decreases in regional volumes and overall stability in brain size are shown to occur during later childhood and adolescence, contrary to general misconceptions of brain growth over this period. Regional changes in brain volume throughout childhood and adolescence are relevant in relation to landmarks in behavioral development and the emergence of clinical disorders over this age period.
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Cited by (0)
The first author thanks Prof. A.J. Durston and Dr. B.N.M. van Berckel for their critical review of the manuscript.