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Your Brain Expands and Shrinks Over Time – These Charts Show How

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Your Brain Expands and Shrinks Over Time – These Charts Show How

Based on more than 120,000 brain scans, the charts are still preliminary. But researchers hope they could one day be used as a routine clinical tool by physicians.

Nature,

5 min read
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A large-scale study of MRI scans shows how the human brain expands and shrinks over a lifetime.

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A significant new study shows that the human brain expands in childhood, and shrinks as people age, reports Max Kozlov in Nature. Although considered a work in progress, the collection of more than 120,000 MRI scans reveals remarkable clarity in important aspects of human brain structure. Issues of expense and access have previously prevented the compilation and assessment of such a large group of brain images, which provide illuminating data on brain development, and may eventually contribute to studies of brain abnormalities and disease. 

Summary

The first comprehensive brain development charts show how human brains expand and shrink over time.

In their study published in Nature, University of Pennsylvania researcher Jakob Seidlitz and co-workers show that human brains quickly expand in youth, and shrink as people age. Rather than performing MRI scans for their study, the group collected scans from other scientists, who were willing to share data sets from their own studies. This allowed them to amass the world’s largest collection of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans – more than 120,000.

This is in stark contrast to many imaging studies that feature small sample sizes and may have reproducibility issues. MRI scans are so expensive that researchers are typically limited in the number of study participants they enroll.

The study’s authors know their data could be more inclusive if they added scans from a more diverse population.

Seidlitz’s team knows that their work lacks diversity, as it relied on scans collected mostly from Europe and North America. The subjects were largely university-aged, white, affluent, and from...

About the Author

Max Kozlov is a science journalist at Nature. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Quanta Magazine, Science, The Scientist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Behavioral Scientist and The Public’s Radio.

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