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Very early brain damage leads to remodeling of the working memory system in adulthood: a combined fMRI/Tractography study

Froudist-Walsh, Seán, Karolis, Vyacheslav, Caldinelli, Chiara, Brittain, Philip J., Kroll, Jasmin, Rodríguez-Toscano, Elisa, Tesse, Marcello, Colquhoun, Matthew, Howes, Oliver, Dell'Acqua, Flavio, Thiebaut de Schotten, Michel, Murray, Robin M., Williams, Steven C.R. and Nosarti, Chiara 2015. Very early brain damage leads to remodeling of the working memory system in adulthood: a combined fMRI/Tractography study. Journal of Neuroscience 35 (48) , pp. 15787-15799. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4769-14.2015

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Abstract

The human brain can adapt to overcome injury even years after an initial insult. One hypothesis states that early brain injury survivors, by taking advantage of critical periods of high plasticity during childhood, should recover more successfully than those who suffer injury later in life. This hypothesis has been challenged by recent studies showing worse cognitive outcome in individuals with early brain injury, compared with individuals with later brain injury, with working memory particularly affected. We invited individuals who suffered perinatal brain injury (PBI) for an fMRI/diffusion MRI tractography study of working memory and hypothesized that, 30 years after the initial injury, working memory deficits in the PBI group would remain, despite compensatory activation in areas outside the typical working memory network. Furthermore we hypothesized that the amount of functional reorganization would be related to the level of injury to the dorsal cingulum tract, which connects medial frontal and parietal working memory structures. We found that adults who suffered PBI did not significantly differ from controls in working memory performance. They exhibited less activation in classic frontoparietal working memory areas and a relative overactivation of bilateral perisylvian cortex compared with controls. Structurally, the dorsal cingulum volume and hindrance-modulated orientational anisotropy was significantly reduced in the PBI group. Furthermore there was uniquely in the PBI group a significant negative correlation between the volume of this tract and activation in the bilateral perisylvian cortex and a positive correlation between this activation and task performance. This provides the first evidence of compensatory plasticity of the working memory network following PBI.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Published Online
Status: Published
Schools: Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Psychology
Subjects: R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
R Medicine > RJ Pediatrics
Publisher: The Society for Neuroscience
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 10 June 2017
Date of Acceptance: 12 October 2015
Last Modified: 05 May 2023 18:52
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/101151

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