The study published December 8, 2011, issue of the journal Neuron, revealed that functionally connected brain regions mature together, and it uncovers sex-specific differences in brain development. “Understanding patterns of structural change in the developing human brain is a challenge because the types of change that we can detect using neuroimaging unfold rather slowly,” explained lead study author, Dr. Armin Raznahan, from the US National Institutes of Mental Health (Bethesda, MD, USA). “So, we drew from the largest and longest-running longitudinal neuroimaging study of human brain maturation, where brain changes were tracked for over several years in the same set of individuals, to analyze patterns of correlated anatomical change across the sensitive developmental window of late childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.”

Dr. Raznahan and colleagues assessed the thickness of the cortex because it can be effectively measured and its developmental alterations have been described in detail. The researchers discovered that rates of structural maturation were highly coordinated in the cortex and that regions that were functionally connected to each other also showed tightly coupled patterns of maturation. Intriguingly, the researchers also observed that maturational merging within the brain regions crucial for complex decision-making differed between males and females.

“Our study represents the first ever investigation of correlated anatomical maturation in the developing human brain and shows that rates of structural cortical development in different cortical regions are highly organized with respect to one another,” concluded Dr. Raznahan. “By providing the first link between cortical connectivity and the coordination of cortical development, we reveal a previously unseen property of healthy brain maturation, which may represent a target for neurodevelopmental disease processes and a substrate for sexually dimorphic behavior in adolescence.”

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US National Institutes of Mental Health