Brain Development Does Not Stop at Adolescence as Once Thought

It has been a long-held belief in medical communities that the human brain stopped developing in adolescence. Now there is evidence that this is in fact not the case, due to medical research conducted in the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) by scientist Dr. Christian Beaulieu and by his PhD student at the time, Catherine Lebel. Dr. Lebel recently moved to the United States to work at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA; USA), where she is a postdoctoral fellow working with an expert in brain-imaging research.

“This is the first long-range study, using a type of imaging that looks at brain wiring, to show that in the white matter there are still structural changes happening during young adulthood,” stated Dr. Lebel.

The duo published their findings July 27, 2011, in the Journal of Neuroscience. For their research, they used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 103 healthy people between the ages of five and 32. Each study subject was scanned at least twice, with a total of 221 scans being conducted overall. The study demonstrated that areas of the brain continue to develop postadolescence within individual subjects.

The study’s findings revealed that young adult brains were continuing to develop wiring to the frontal lobe, tracts responsible for complex cognitive tasks such as inhibition, high-level functioning, and attention. The researchers speculated that this might be due to a host of life experiences in young adulthood such as pursing postsecondary education, starting a career, independence, and developing new social and family relationships.

A significant observation the researchers made when reviewing the brain-imaging scan findings was that in some people, several tracts demonstrated reductions in white matter integrity over time, which is associated with the brain degrading. The researchers hypothesized that this observation needs to be additionally examined because it may provide a better determination of the relationship between psychiatric disorders and brain structure. These disorders typically develop in adolescence or young adulthood.

“What’s interesting is a lot of psychiatric illness and other disorders emerge during adolescence, so some of the thought might be if certain tracts start to degenerate too soon, it may not be responsible for these disorders, but it may be one of the factors that makes someone more susceptible to developing these disorders,” said Dr. Beaulieu. “It’s nice to provide insight into what the brain is doing in a healthy control population and then use that as a springboard so others can ask questions about how different clinical disorders like psychiatric disease and neurological disease may be linked to brain structure as the brain progresses with age.”

Related Links:
University of Alberta
University of California, Los Angeles