Brain and Behavior Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry,Department of Radiology, Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics,
Department of Radiology, Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics,Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8643-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1400178111. Epub 2014 May 27.
Puberty is the defining biological process of adolescent development, yet its effects on fundamental properties of brain physiology such as cerebral blood flow (CBF) have never been investigated. Capitalizing on a sample of 922 youths ages 8-22 y imaged using arterial spin labeled MRI as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we studied normative developmental differences in cerebral perfusion in males and females, as well as specific associations between puberty and CBF. Males and females had conspicuously divergent nonlinear trajectories in CBF evolution with development as modeled by penalized splines. Seventeen brain regions, including hubs of the executive and default mode networks, showed a robust nonlinear age-by-sex interaction that surpassed Bonferroni correction. Notably, within these regions the decline in CBF was similar between males and females in early puberty and only diverged in midpuberty, with CBF actually increasing in females. Taken together, these results delineate sex-specific growth curves for CBF during youth and for the first time to our knowledge link such differential patterns of development to the effects of puberty.
青春期是青少年发育的决定性生物学过程，但它对大脑生理学的基本特性（如脑血流 (CBF)）的影响从未被研究过。利用动脉自旋标记 MRI 对 922 名 8-22 岁的年轻人进行成像的样本，作为费城神经发育队列的一部分，我们研究了男性和女性大脑灌注的正常发育差异，以及青春期与 CBF 之间的特定关联。男性和女性的 CBF 演变都呈现出明显的非线性轨迹，这可以通过惩罚样条模型来模拟。17 个脑区，包括执行和默认模式网络的枢纽，表现出强烈的非线性年龄与性别相互作用，超过了 Bonferroni 校正。值得注意的是，在这些区域中，男性和女性在青春期早期的 CBF 下降相似，仅在青春期中期出现差异，女性的 CBF 实际上增加了。总的来说，这些结果描绘了青少年时期 CBF 的性别特异性生长曲线，并且首次根据我们的知识将这种发展模式的差异与青春期的影响联系起来。
