Regional patterns of human cortex development correlate with underlying neurobiology

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 15; no. 1; pp. 7987 - 21
• Main Authors: Lotter, Leon D., Saberi, Amin, Hansen, Justine Y., Misic, Bratislav, Paquola, Casey, Barker, Gareth J., Bokde, Arun L. W., Desrivières, Sylvane, Flor, Herta, Grigis, Antoine, Garavan, Hugh, Gowland, Penny, Heinz, Andreas, Brühl, Rüdiger, Martinot, Jean-Luc, Paillère, Marie-Laure, Artiges, Eric, Papadopoulos Orfanos, Dimitri, Paus, Tomáš, Poustka, Luise, Hohmann, Sarah, Fröhner, Juliane H., Smolka, Michael N., Vaidya, Nilakshi, Walter, Henrik, Whelan, Robert, Schumann, Gunter, Nees, Frauke, Banaschewski, Tobias, Eickhoff, Simon B., Dukart, Juergen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 12.09.2024; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 38/61; 59/57; 59/78; 631/378/2571; 631/378/2611; 631/378/368; Adolescent; Adolescents; Adult; Aged; Aging; Aging - physiology; Brain; Brain architecture; Cerebral Cortex - diagnostic imaging; Cerebral Cortex - growth & development; Cerebral Cortex - metabolism; Child; Child, Preschool; Children; Cholinergics; Dopamine receptors; Female; Gene expression; Glial cells; Glutamatergic transmission; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; In vivo methods and tests; Life Sciences; Life span; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical imaging; Middle Aged; Morphology; multidisciplinary; Neurobiology; Neuroimaging; Neuronal-glial interactions; Neurons - metabolism; Neurosciences; Population studies; Quorum sensing; Receptors; Regional development; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Spatial distribution; Thickness; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-52366-7

Human brain morphology undergoes complex changes over the lifespan. Despite recent progress in tracking brain development via normative models, current knowledge of underlying biological mechanisms is highly limited. We demonstrate that human cortical thickness development and aging trajectories unfold along patterns of molecular and cellular brain organization, traceable from population-level to individual developmental trajectories. During childhood and adolescence, cortex-wide spatial distributions of dopaminergic receptors, inhibitory neurons, glial cell populations, and brain-metabolic features explain up to 50% of the variance associated with a lifespan model of regional cortical thickness trajectories. In contrast, modeled cortical thickness change patterns during adulthood are best explained by cholinergic and glutamatergic neurotransmitter receptor and transporter distributions. These relationships are supported by developmental gene expression trajectories and translate to individual longitudinal data from over 8000 adolescents, explaining up to 59% of developmental change at cohort- and 18% at single-subject level. Integrating neurobiological brain atlases with normative modeling and population neuroimaging provides a biologically meaningful path to understand brain development and aging in living humans. The neurobiology of human brain development and aging is hard to study in vivo. The authors report on distinct spatial associations between brain morphology and cellular as well as molecular brain properties throughout neurodevelopment and aging.