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Cortical thickness development of human primary visual cortex related to the age of blindness onset

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Abstract

Blindness primarily induces structural alteration in the primary visual cortex (V1). Some studies have found that the early blind subjects had a thicker V1 compared to sighted controls, whereas late blind subjects showed no significant differences in the V1. This implies that the age of blindness onset may exert significant effects on the development of cortical thickness of the V1. However, no previous research used a trajectory of the age of blindness onset-related changes to investigate these effects. Here we explored this issue by mapping the cortical thickness trajectory of the V1 against the age of blindness onset using data from 99 blind individuals whose age of blindness onset ranged from birth to 34 years. We found that the cortical thickness of the V1 could be fitted well with a quadratic curve in both the left (F = 11.59, P = 3 × 10−5) and right hemispheres (F = 6.54, P = 2 × 10−3). Specifically, the cortical thickness of the V1 thinned rapidly during childhood and adolescence and did not change significantly thereafter. This trend was not observed in the primary auditory cortex (A1), primary motor cortex (M1), or primary somatosensory cortex (S1). These results provide evidence that an onset of blindness before adulthood significantly affects the cortical thickness of the V1 and suggest a critical period for cortical development of the human V1.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Key Basic Research and Development Program (973) (Grant 2011CB707800), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant XDB02030300) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 91132301, 91432302, 81471380, 81101040). The authors thank Prof. Rhoda Perozzi and Prof. Edmund Perozzi for their considerable help in the manuscript preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brainnetome Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Qiaojun Li, Ming Song & Tianzi Jiang

  2. National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Qiaojun Li, Ming Song & Tianzi Jiang

  3. Department of Radiology, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, 300052, China

    Jiayuan Xu, Wen Qin & Chunshui Yu

  4. CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Tianzi Jiang

  5. The Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, QLD, Brisbane, Australia

    Tianzi Jiang

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  1. Qiaojun Li
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Correspondence to Tianzi Jiang.

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Human studies

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Ethics Committee of Tianjin Medical University and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

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Informed consent was obtained from all the individual participants included in the study.

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Qiaojun Li and Ming Song contributed equally to this work and share the first authorship.

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Li, Q., Song, M., Xu, J. et al. Cortical thickness development of human primary visual cortex related to the age of blindness onset. Brain Imaging and Behavior 11, 1029–1036 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-016-9576-8

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