PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Efstathios D. Gennatas
AU  - Brian B. Avants
AU  - Daniel H. Wolf
AU  - Theodore D. Satterthwaite
AU  - Kosha Ruparel
AU  - Rastko Ciric
AU  - Hakon Hakonarson
AU  - Raquel E. Gur
AU  - Ruben C. Gur
TI  - Age-related effects and sex differences in gray matter density, volume, mass, and cortical thickness from childhood to young adulthood
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3550-16.2017
DP  - 2017 Apr 21
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 3550-16
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2017/04/21/JNEUROSCI.3550-16.2017.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2017/04/21/JNEUROSCI.3550-16.2017.full
AB  - Developmental structural neuroimaging studies in humans have long described decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness during adolescence. Gray matter density, a measure often assumed to be highly related to volume, has not been systematically investigated in development. We used T1 imaging data collected on the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort to study age-related effects and sex differences in four regional gray matter measures in 1189 youths aged 8 to 23 years. Custom T1 segmentation and a novel high-resolution gray matter parcellation were used to extract gray matter density (GMD), gray matter volume (GMV), gray matter mass (GMM, defined as GMD * GMV), and cortical thickness (CT) from 1625 brain regions. Non-linear models revealed that each modality exhibits unique age-related effects and sex differences. While GMV and CT generally decrease with age, GMD increases and shows the strongest age-related effects, while GMM shows slight decline overall. Females have lower GMV but higher GMD than males throughout the brain. Our findings suggest that GMD is a prime phenotype for assessment of brain development and likely cognition and that periadolescent gray matter loss may be less pronounced than previously thought. This work highlights the need for combined quantitative histological-MRI studies.