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. 2014 Jun 10;111(23):8643-8.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1400178111. Epub 2014 May 27.

Impact of puberty on the evolution of cerebral perfusion during adolescence

Theodore D Satterthwaite  1 , Russell T Shinohara  2 , Daniel H Wolf  3 , Ryan D Hopson  4 , Mark A Elliott  5 , Simon N Vandekar  4 , Kosha Ruparel  4 , Monica E Calkins  4 , David R Roalf  4 , Efstathios D Gennatas  4 , Chad Jackson  4 , Guray Erus  6 , Karthik Prabhakaran  4 , Christos Davatzikos  6 , John A Detre  7 , Hakon Hakonarson  8 , Ruben C Gur  9 , Raquel E Gur  10
Affiliations

Impact of puberty on the evolution of cerebral perfusion during adolescence

Theodore D Satterthwaite et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Puberty is the defining biological process of adolescent development, yet its effects on fundamental properties of brain physiology such as cerebral blood flow (CBF) have never been investigated. Capitalizing on a sample of 922 youths ages 8-22 y imaged using arterial spin labeled MRI as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, we studied normative developmental differences in cerebral perfusion in males and females, as well as specific associations between puberty and CBF. Males and females had conspicuously divergent nonlinear trajectories in CBF evolution with development as modeled by penalized splines. Seventeen brain regions, including hubs of the executive and default mode networks, showed a robust nonlinear age-by-sex interaction that surpassed Bonferroni correction. Notably, within these regions the decline in CBF was similar between males and females in early puberty and only diverged in midpuberty, with CBF actually increasing in females. Taken together, these results delineate sex-specific growth curves for CBF during youth and for the first time to our knowledge link such differential patterns of development to the effects of puberty.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Main effect of age on cerebral perfusion. (A) Cerebral perfusion declines throughout the cortex, but most prominently in heteromodal association cortex, including hubs of the default mode network and executive system. Image thresholded at z > 4.9 (Bonferroni P < 0.05), k > 100. (B) Mean gray matter CBF declines in a nonlinear fashion. Data points represent mean gray matter CBF of each subject (n = 922), fit with a penalized spline within a general additive model.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
A voxelwise GAM revealed that the developmental pattern of CBF change differed significantly between males (blue) and females (pink) in multiple regions within heteromodal association cortex (see Table 2 for a complete list). Whereas CBF values declined in males until late adolescence, CBF in females declined until midadolescence but increased thereafter. Images thresholded at z > 4.9 (Bonferroni corrected P < 0.05), k > 100; age plots in bottom row depict GAM fit for each voxel in a specified cluster, stratified by sex and adjusted for model covariates. See Fig. S1 for display of complete results.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Impact of puberty on sex-specific patterns of CBF change. Age-related differences in CBF diverge in males (blue) and females (pink) with advancing pubertal development. Error bars represent SEs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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