Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 197 University Avenue, Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA.
Neuroimage. 2010 Feb 1;49(3):2791-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.10.029. Epub 2009 Oct 19.
Recently, structural MRI studies in children have been used to examine relations between brain volume and behavioral measures. However, most of these studies have been done in children older than 2 years of age. Obtaining volumetric measures in infants is considerably more difficult, as structures are less well defined and largely unmyelinated, making segmentation challenging. Moreover, it is still unclear whether individual anatomic variation across development, in healthy, normally developing infants, is reflected in the configuration and function of the mature brain and, as importantly, whether variation in infant brain structure might be related to later cognitive and linguistic abilities. In this longitudinal study, using T1 structural MRI, we identified links between amygdala volume in normally developing, naturally sleeping, 6-month infants and their subsequent language abilities at 2, 3 and 4 years. The images were processed and manually segmented using Cardviews to extract volumetric measures. Intra-rater reliability for repeated segmentation was 87.73% of common voxel agreement. Standardized language assessments were administered at 6 and 12 months and at 2, 3 and 4 years. Significant and consistent correlations were found between amygdala size and language abilities. Children with larger right amygdalae at 6 months had lower scores on expressive and receptive language measures at 2, 3, and 4 years. Associations between amygdala size and language outcomes have been reported in children with autism. The findings presented here extend this association to normally developing children, supporting the idea that the amygdalae might play an important but as yet unspecified role in mediating language acquisition.
最近，结构磁共振成像研究已被用于研究脑容量与行为测量之间的关系。然而，这些研究大多是在 2 岁以上的儿童中进行的。在婴儿中获得体积测量值要困难得多，因为结构定义不明确，且大部分尚未髓鞘化，使得分割具有挑战性。此外，目前仍不清楚在健康、正常发育的婴儿中，个体解剖结构在整个发育过程中的差异是否反映在成熟大脑的结构和功能上，同样重要的是，婴儿大脑结构的差异是否与以后的认知和语言能力有关。在这项纵向研究中，我们使用 T1 结构磁共振成像，在正常发育、自然睡眠的 6 个月大婴儿中发现了杏仁核体积与他们 2、3 和 4 岁时的后续语言能力之间的联系。使用 Cardviews 对图像进行处理和手动分割，以提取体积测量值。重复分割的组内可靠性为常见体素一致性的 87.73%。在 6 个月和 12 个月以及 2、3 和 4 岁时进行标准化语言评估。在杏仁核大小和语言能力之间发现了显著且一致的相关性。6 个月时右侧杏仁核较大的儿童在 2、3 和 4 岁时的表达性和接受性语言测试中得分较低。在自闭症儿童中已经报道了杏仁核大小与语言结果之间的关联。这里提出的发现将这种关联扩展到了正常发育的儿童，支持了杏仁核可能在介导语言习得中发挥重要但尚未明确的作用的观点。
