Abstract
Functional responses recorded during the last trimester of gestation reveal that human sensory activity begins before birth, allowing the brain to process the external environment. Along with the maturation of the brain, new cognitive skills emerge in the human infant’s brain. The development of non-invasive techniques provides the opportunity to study the relationship between brain structural maturation and cognitive development in vivo. Here, we aimed to relate developmental changes of the latency of cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) to a structural maturation index, presumed to be representative of myelination. CAEPs to syllables were recorded in 17 preterm neonates with a mean recording age of 30.5 weeks gestational age (28.4–32.2 wGA). The latency of the first peak of the global field power (GFP) was considered the functional feature of interest to be examined for correlation with age and the structural maturation index extracted from brain atlases of the corresponding term age. GFP latency significantly decreased with age (R2 = 0.311, p = 0.02). Structural maturation indices, calculated as the mean values of T1w/T2w image intensities, were extracted for various brain regions. We observed significant correlations between the maturation indices of the auditory-involved areas and the latency of the GFP first-peak, as well as age. In hierarchical models, neither the structural maturation index nor age contributed to significant additional variance in the GFP first-peak latency after accounting for the variance associated with the other parameter.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Picardie regional council (Hemisphere Nord), by EGIDE France and CISSC Iran under the grant number 961/93-9-2 (Jundi Shapour scientific collaboration program) and by the Co-tutelle program of the French Embassy in Tehran for Ph.D. students. It was also partially supported by COGC, Iran in the framework of the Neurobiom project under grant number 96P97.
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The study was approved by the Amiens University Hospital local ethics committee (CPP Nord-Ouest II) according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 (ref ID-RCB 2008-A00728-47).
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Daneshvarfard, F., Abrishami Moghaddam, H., Kongolo, G. et al. Functional and structural correlates of the preterm infant’s brain: relating developmental changes of auditory evoked responses to structural maturation. Brain Struct Funct 225, 2165–2176 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02117-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02117-3
Keywords
- Functional development
- Auditory evoked responses
- Global filed power
- Structural maturation
- Myelination index
- Preterm infants
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Functional and structural correlates of the preterm infant’s brain: relating developmental changes of auditory evoked responses to structural maturation- Published:
- 01 September 2020
- Received:
- 14 September 2019
- Accepted:
- 10 July 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-020-02117-3