Multivariate and Regional Age-Related Change in Basal Ganglia Iron in Neonates

Abstract

In the perinatal period, reward and cognitive systems begin trajectories, influencing later psychiatric risk. The basal ganglia is critical for reward and cognitive processing but early development is understudied. To assess age-related development, we used a measure of basal ganglia physiology, specifically brain tissue iron, obtained from nT2* signal in rsfMRI, linked to dopaminergic processing. We used data from the Developing Human Connectome Project (N=464) to assess how moving from the prenatal to the postnatal environment affects rsfMRI nT2*, modeling gestational and postnatal age separately for basal ganglia subregions in linear models. We didn't find associations with tissue iron and gestational age [Range:24.29-42.29] but found positive associations with postnatal age [Range:0-17.14] in the pallidum and putamen, but not the caudate. We tested if there was an interaction between preterm birth and postnatal age, finding early preterm infants (GA<35 weeks) had higher iron levels and changed less over time. To assess multivariate change, we used support vector regression to predict age from voxel-wise nT2* maps. We could predict postnatal but not gestational age when maps were residualized for the other age term. This provides evidence subregions differentially change with postnatal experience and early preterm birth may disrupt trajectories.