New paper in Nature Neurosience
IKND researchers have investigated the development of the brain during the transition from adolescence to adulthood and find an increasing risk of psychiatric disorders. Their results have been published in the journal "Nature Neuroscience".
The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a period when ongoing brain development coincides with a substantially increased risk of psychiatric disorders. The developmental brain changes accounting for this emergent psychiatric symptomatology remain obscure.
Capitalizing on a unique longitudinal dataset that includes in vivo myelin-sensitive magnetization transfer (MT) MRI scans, we show that this developmental period is characterized by brain-wide growth in MT trajectories within both gray matter and adjacent juxtacortical white matter. In this healthy population, the expression of common developmental traits, namely compulsivity and impulsivity, is tied to a reduced growth of these MT trajectories in fronto-striatal regions. These findings highlight that psychiatric traits of compulsivity and impulsivity are linked to regionally specific reductions in myelin-related growth in late adolescent brain development.
