Age-related grey matter changes in preterm infants: An MRI study

Regional and Hemispheric Asymmetries of Cerebral Hemodynamic and Oxygen Metabolism in Newborns

“…In agreement with glucose metabolism, synaptic density counts on ex vivo brain tissue show similar regional differences, with the auditory and parietal cortices reaching their highest level at age 3 months, whereas synapses in the prefrontal cortex continue to grow until 15 months of age (Huttenlocher and Dabholkar 1997). These functional regional differences are matched by anatomical differences as shown by recent structural MRI studies that report greater gray matter growth in the occipital and parietal regions than in the prefrontal region in newborns (Gilmore et al 2007;Tzarouchi et al 2009). …”

“…matter grows faster in the parietal and occipital regions than in the frontal and prefrontal regions (Gilmore et al 2007;Tzarouchi et al 2009). When comparing the temporal and parietal regions, we found higher CBF i , CBV, and SO 2 in the former.…”

“…Hemispheric anatomical asymmetries of the fetal and premature cortex were first observed in postmortem studies, with the discovery that certain areas of the right hemisphere mature more quickly than corresponding areas in the left (Chi et al 1977;Kretschmann et al 1986;de Schonen and Mathivet 1989;Simonds and Scheibel 1989). While recent technological progress has allowed for the study of less compromised brains, confirmation of these early postmortem studies is not always convincing, with more recent MRI studies finding left--right hemispheric asymmetries in infants to be region specific (Tzarouchi et al 2009;Dubois et al 2010). In fact, contradictory results have been reported as to the size of left and right hemispheres.…”

Voxel-Based Morphometry and fMRI Revealed Differences in Brain Gray Matter in Breastfed and Milk Formula–Fed Children

“…These results differ from those of Herba et al, 21 who showed a larger gangliothalamic ovoid diameter in BF-versus-formula-fed infants as quantified by using sonography. These apparent discordant results may be influenced by the brain maturation pattern of deep gray matter, which develops earlier than cortical gray matter 22 ; thus, diet effects on gray matter may be more prominent in deep regions during infancy, but in cortical regions during later childhood. Our VBM analysis identified higher regional gray matter volume in the parietal lobe of BF-versus-MF children, in agreement with Kafouri et al, 7 who reported a positive association between the duration of exclusive breastfeeding and cortical thickness of superior and inferior parietal lobules.…”

Comparison of two nonlinear registration techniques to investigate brain atrophy patterns in normal aging

“…IBASPM works well for brain segmentation, individual atlas generation, labeling of individual gray matter areas and volume computation [3]. This toolkit has also been used to investigate regional volume changes in developmental [6], normal aging [7] and disease states [8]. IBASPM is implanted in the SPM5 software package, which employs the Normalization method to implement nonlinear registration.…”