A new King’s College London scanning study of 390 babies has shown distinct patterns between term and preterm babies in the dynamic (moment-to-moment) connectivity of brain networks.

Supported by Wellcome and the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, this is the first study to analyse how the communication between brain areas changes moment-to-moment in the first few weeks of life.
Published in Nature Communications, the study also found that these dynamic patterns of brain connectivity in babies were linked to developmental measures of movement, language, cognition and social behaviour 18 months later.
There is increasing awareness that conditions such as ADHD, autism and schizophrenia have their origins early in life, and that the development of these conditions may be linked to neonatal brain connectivity and its fluctuations over time.
Researchers used state-of-the-art techniques to evaluate functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data on 324 full term babies and 66 preterm babies (born at less than 37 weeks gestation). They assessed how the connectivity changed moment-to-moment during the time the baby was in the scanner to provide a dynamic picture. Previous research with babies has typically used a measure of connectivity averaged over time spent in the scanner.
The study used methods that tap into how the brain connectivity fluctuates: one method that considers connectivity patterns across the whole brain and one that considers patterns within different regions of the brain.
The study identified six different brain states: three of these were across the whole brain and three were constrained to regions of the brain (occipital, sensorimotor and frontal regions). By comparing term and preterm babies the researchers showed that different patterns of connectivity are linked to preterm birth, for example preterm babies spent more time in frontal and occipital brain states than term babies. They also demonstrated that brain state dynamics at birth are linked to a range of developmental outcomes in early childhood.
The data was sourced from The Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), which is led by King’s College London and funded by the European Research Council. It is providing high resolution magnetic resonance brain images from unborn and newborn babies to scientists worldwide to support a large number of world-leading research projects into brain development and cerebral or mental health disorders.
Professor David Edwards,  author and Principal Investigator of dHCP and Head of Department of Perinatal Imaging and Health, King’s College London said: “This study shows the power of the large set of data acquired by the Developing Human Connectome Project, an open science programme funded by the European Research Council and led by King’s College London in collaboration with Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. The data are freely available to researchers who want to study human brain development.”


This content is taken from King's College London

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"Patterns of brain connectivity differ between preterm and term babies", MachPrinciple, October 09, 2024, https://machprinciple.com/post/Patterns-of-brain-connectivity-differ-between-preterm-and-term-babies