Gestational and postnatal age associations for striatal tissue iron deposition in early infancy

Laura Cabral, Finnegan J. Calabro, Jerod Rasmussen, Will Foran, Lucille A. Moore, Alice Graham, Thomas G. O'Connor, Pathik D. Wadhwa, Sonja Entringer, Damien Fair, Claudia Buss, Ashok Panigrahy, Beatriz Luna

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Striatal development is crucial for later motor, cognitive, and reward behavior, but age-related change in striatal physiology during the neonatal period remains understudied. An MRI-based measure of tissue iron deposition, T2*, is a non-invasive way to probe striatal physiology neonatally, linked to dopaminergic processing and cognition in children and adults. Striatal subregions have distinct functions that may come online at different time periods in early life. To identify if there are critical periods before or after birth, we measured if striatal iron accrued with gestational age at birth [range= 34.57–41.85 weeks] or postnatal age at scan [range= 5–64 days], using MRI to probe the T2* signal in N = 83 neonates in three striatal subregions. We found iron increased with postnatal age in the pallidum and putamen but not the caudate. No significant relationship between iron and gestational age was observed. Using a subset of infants scanned at preschool age (N = 26), we show distributions of iron shift between time points. In infants, the pallidum had the least iron of the three regions but had the most by preschool age. Together, this provides evidence of distinct change for striatal subregions, a possible differentiation between motor and cognitive systems, identifying a mechanism that may impact future trajectories.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number101286
JournalDevelopmental Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume63
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023

Keywords

  • Development of t2* signal in infancy
  • Early brain trajectories
  • Striatum
  • Subcortical development
  • Tissue iron

PubMed: MeSH publication types

  • Journal Article

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Gestational and postnatal age associations for striatal tissue iron deposition in early infancy'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this