Structural brain dynamics across reading development: A longitudinal MRI study from kindergarten to grade 5

• Main Authors: Ghesquière, P. (Author), Phan, T.V (Author), Sima, D. (Author), Smeets, D. (Author), Vandermosten, M. (Author), Wouters, J. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley and Sons Inc 2021
• Subjects: anatomy and histology; anterior cingulate; Article; brain; brain cortex; brain development; brain growth; brain region; Cerebral Cortex; child; Child; child development; Child Development; Child, Preschool; childhood; cingulate gyrus; cortical development; diagnostic imaging; dyslexia; Dyslexia; female; fusiform gyrus; gray matter volume; growth, development and aging; heredity; human; Humans; kindergarten; lateral orbitofrontal cortex; longitudinal; Longitudinal Studies; longitudinal study; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; major clinical study; male; Male; MRI; nerve cell network; nerve cell plasticity; Nerve Net; neuroimaging; Neuroimaging; nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; pars opercularis; pathology; pathophysiology; physiology; precuneus; preschool child; primary school; reading; Reading
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Primary education is the incubator for learning academic skills that help children to become a literate, communicative, and independent person. Over this learning period, nonlinear and regional changes in the brain occur, but how these changes relate to academic performance, such as reading ability, is still unclear. In the current study, we analyzed longitudinal T1 MRI data of 41 children in order to investigate typical cortical development during the early reading stage (end of kindergarten–end of grade 2) and advanced reading stage (end of grade 2–middle of grade 5), and to detect putative deviant trajectories in children with dyslexia. The structural brain change was quantified with a reliable measure that directly calculates the local morphological differences between brain images of two time points, while considering the global head growth. When applying this measure to investigate typical cortical development, we observed that left temporal and temporoparietal regions belonging to the reading network exhibited an increase during the early reading stage and stabilized during the advanced reading stage. This suggests that the natural plasticity window for reading is within the first years of primary school, hence earlier than the typical period for reading intervention. Concerning neurotrajectories in children with dyslexia compared to typical readers, we observed no differences in gray matter development of the left reading network, but we found different neurotrajectories in right IFG opercularis (during the early reading stage) and in right isthmus cingulate (during the advanced reading stage), which could reflect compensatory neural mechanisms. © 2021 The Authors. Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.