Network evolution of regional brain volumes in young children reflects neurocognitive scores and mother's education

The maturation of regional brain volumes from birth to preadolescence is a
critical developmental process that underlies emerging brain structural
connectivity and function. Regulated by genes and environment, the
coordinated growth of different brain regions plays an important role in
cognitive development. Current knowledge about structural network
evolution is limited, partly due to the sparse and irregular nature of
most longitudinal neuroimaging data. In particular, it is unknown how
factors such as mother’s education or sex of the child impact the
structural network evolution. To address this issue, we propose a method
to construct evolving structural networks and study how the evolving
connections among brain regions as reflected at the network level are
related to maternal education and biological sex of the child and also how
they are associated with cognitive development. Our methodology is based
on applying local Fréchet regression to longitudinal neuroimaging data
acquired from the RESONANCE cohort, a cohort of healthy children (245
females and 309 males) ranging in age from 9 weeks to 10 years. Our
findings reveal that sustained highly coordinated volume growth across
brain regions is associated with lower maternal education and lower
cognitive development. This suggests that higher neurocognitive
performance levels in children are associated with increased variability
of regional growth patterns as children age.