Abstract■ During childhood and adolescence, ongoing white matter maturation in the fronto-parietal cortices and connecting fiber tracts is measurable with diffusion-weighted imaging. Important questions remain, however, about the links between these changes and developing cognitive functions. Spatial working memory (SWM) performance improves significantly throughout the childhood years, and several lines of evidence implicate the left fronto-parietal cortices and connecting fiber tracts in SWM processing. Here we report results from a study of 76 typically developing children, 7 to 13 years of age. We hypothesized that better SWM performance would be associated with increased fractional anisotropy (FA) in a left fronto-parietal network composed of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF), the regional white matter underlying the dorsolateral pFC, and the posterior parietal cortex. As hypothesized, we observed a significant association between higher FA in the left fronto-parietal network and better SWM skills, and the effect was independent of age. This association was mainly accounted for by variability in left SLF FA and remained significant when FA measures from global fiber tracts or right SLF were included in the model. Further, the effect of FA in left SLF appeared to be mediated primarily by decreasing perpendicular diffusivity. Such associations could be related to individual differences among children in the architecture of fronto-parietal connections and/or to differences in the pace of fiber tract development. Further studies are needed to determine the contributions of intrinsic and experiential factors to the development of functionally significant individual differences in fiber tract structure. ■
Brain age is a widely used index for quantifying individuals’ brain health as deviation from a normative brain aging trajectory. Higher-than-expected brain age is thought partially to reflect above-average rate of brain aging. Here, we explicitly tested this assumption in two independent large test datasets (UK Biobank [main] and Lifebrain [replication]; longitudinal observations ≈ 2750 and 4200) by assessing the relationship between cross-sectional and longitudinal estimates of brain age. Brain age models were estimated in two different training datasets (n ≈ 38,000 [main] and 1800 individuals [replication]) based on brain structural features. The results showed no association between cross-sectional brain age and the rate of brain change measured longitudinally. Rather, brain age in adulthood was associated with the congenital factors of birth weight and polygenic scores of brain age, assumed to reflect a constant, lifelong influence on brain structure from early life. The results call for nuanced interpretations of cross-sectional indices of the aging brain and question their validity as markers of ongoing within-person changes of the aging brain. Longitudinal imaging data should be preferred whenever the goal is to understand individual change trajectories of brain and cognition in aging.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.