Autism Vox

Brain Development in Male & Female Infants

by Kristina Chew, PhD on February 13th, 2007

In the first few months after birth, it is the back regions of the brain—which control vision and sensory information—that display notable growth, whereas the prefrontal region— which controls abstract thought—grows very little in the same period of time. Under Dr. John Gilmore, a professor of psychiatry in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, researchers found that the gray matter, which contains most of the brain’s neurons or nerve cells, grew by about 40 percent in the first few months after a child is born; the white matter, which contains the fibers that connect the different brain regions, grew only a little. 74 newborns at the University of North Carolina Hospitals had high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans performed in their first few months of life. Today’s Science Daily highlighted the study’s implications for autism research.

“This study gives us the first glimpse that there are regional differences in how quickly the brain is growing, and these regional differences are probably related to functional development,” he said.

The dramatic growth in gray matter, the part of the brain that contains most of the neurons, or nerve cells, may have implications for autism research, Gilmore said. Children with autism have larger brains and more gray matter than average. The study suggests that in autistic children, something may go awry during gray matter growth in the first year of life, he said. “Too much gray matter may be just as bad as too little gray matter,” Gilmore said.

It was also found that the male children’s brain size was 7.8 percent larger than the female children’s; that males had 10.2 percent more gray matter than females, and 6.4 percent more white matter.

I am interested in finding out more about Dr. Gilmore’s research, which is published under the title of Sexually Dimorphic Brain Development in Infants in the February 7th issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. My own son Charlie has always had a large head and brain size (especially in his prefrontal cortex), and (while his vision is 20/20) he has always had visual tracking issues.

Share This

Related Stories

This is a difficult read: AS, Violence, and MySpace.com
Autism and Big Science
New Evolutionary Theory for the Aetiology of Autism
The Sounds People Make
Honey I Think We Need the Shrink for our Kid!

POSTED IN: Neuroscience