Arend Isabel, Yuen Kenneth, Yizhar Or, Chebat Daniel-Robert, Amedi Amir
The Joseph Sagol Neuroscience Center, The Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Ramat Gan, Israel.
Neuroimaging Center (NIC), Focus Program Translational Neuroscience, Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center, Mainz, Germany.
Front Neurosci. 2022 Nov 9;16:970878. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.970878. eCollection 2022.
Greater cortical gyrification (GY) is linked with enhanced cognitive abilities and is also negatively related to cortical thickness (CT). Individuals who are congenitally blind (CB) exhibits remarkable functional brain plasticity which enables them to perform certain non-visual and cognitive tasks with supranormal abilities. For instance, extensive training using touch and audition enables CB people to develop impressive skills and there is evidence linking these skills to cross-modal activations of primary visual areas. There is a cascade of anatomical, morphometric and functional-connectivity changes in non-visual structures, volumetric reductions in several components of the visual system, and CT is also increased in CB. No study to date has explored GY changes in this population, and no study has explored how variations in CT are related to GY changes in CB. T1-weighted 3D structural magnetic resonance imaging scans were acquired to examine the effects of congenital visual deprivation in cortical structures in a healthy sample of 11 CB individuals (6 male) and 16 age-matched sighted controls (SC) (10 male). In this report, we show for the first time an increase in GY in several brain areas of CB individuals compared to SC, and a negative relationship between GY and CT in the CB brain in several different cortical areas. We discuss the implications of our findings and the contributions of developmental factors and synaptogenesis to the relationship between CT and GY in CB individuals compared to SC. F.
更大的皮质回旋（GY）与增强的认知能力相关，并且与皮质厚度（CT）也呈负相关。先天性失明（CB）个体表现出显著的大脑功能可塑性，这使他们能够以超常能力执行某些非视觉和认知任务。例如，通过触觉和听觉进行广泛训练使CB个体能够发展出令人印象深刻的技能，并且有证据将这些技能与初级视觉区域的跨模态激活联系起来。在非视觉结构中存在一系列解剖学、形态学和功能连接性变化，视觉系统的几个组成部分体积减小，并且CB个体的CT也增加。迄今为止，尚无研究探讨该人群中的GY变化，也没有研究探讨CT变化如何与CB个体的GY变化相关。获取了T1加权3D结构磁共振成像扫描，以检查先天性视觉剥夺对11名CB个体（6名男性）和16名年龄匹配的视力正常对照（SC）（10名男性）的健康样本中皮质结构的影响。在本报告中，我们首次表明，与SC相比，CB个体的几个脑区的GY增加，并且在CB大脑的几个不同皮质区域中，GY与CT之间存在负相关关系。我们讨论了我们的发现的意义，以及发育因素和突触发生对CB个体与SC相比CT和GY之间关系的贡献。F.
