PNAs: brain thickness will become thinner with development?

September 26, 2019 / Biovalley BIOON / - recently, vaidehi natu, a team from Stanford University, California, used the most advanced brain imaging technology to show that children's brains may not be as thin as expected In addition, studies have repeatedly shown that certain areas of the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, become thinner as children grow Studies have shown that for people with an average thickness of 3 mm in the cerebral cortex in childhood, the thickness of the relevant areas will decrease by nearly 1 mm in adulthood For this reason, researchers have put forward various hypotheses to explain For example, it has been determined that gray matter cells and their connecting areas can promote the efficiency of the brain through "pruning" This study shows that when quantitative MRI (or qMRI) is used for measurement, more myelin tissue is found in the brain of young people than previously observed Myelin, the "white component" of white matter, is a fatty sheath that insulates many nerve fibers and allows for faster neurotransmission (image source: www Pixabay Com) evgeniya kirilina, from the Department of neurophysics, MPI CBS, said that "even with histological methods, the fact that cortex thins during development has been confirmed However, due to the process of myelination, the estimated value may deviate The team is actually looking at three specific brain plaques in the hyperopia cortex Although they are very close, each of them shows a unique development model, thus emphasizing the need for careful interpretation The facial and character recognition regions show the above myelination effect, while the position recognition region shows obvious thinning but no sign of myelination On the contrary, it seems to have changed in structure and strengthened with the passage of time The implications of these new discoveries are profound For decades of work, it needs to be reviewed and evaluated for accuracy For example, there is a large amount of literature showing that the thickness of cortex changes when learning new skills Now we need to determine if myelination also works In addition, the degradation of myelin can lead to the occurrence of diseases, which is exactly what happens in multiple sclerosis More accurate measurement techniques such as qMRI are expected to improve our detection, monitoring and treatment of such diseases Sources of information: do children's brains really get thinner? Original sources: vaidehi S natu, Jesse Gomez, Michael Barnett, Brianna jeska, evgeniya kirilina, Carsten Jaeger, Zonglei Zhen, Siobhan Cox, Kevin S Weiner, Nikolaus Weiskopf, kalanit grid Spector Apparent thing of human visual cortex during childhood is associated with myelination Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 2019; 201904931 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904931116