Abstract
The human brain is active during rest and hierarchically organized into intrinsic functional networks. These functional networks are largely established early in development, with reports of a shift from a local to more distributed organization during childhood and adolescence. It remains unknown to what extent genetic and environmental influences on functional connectivity change throughout adolescent development. We measured functional connectivity within and between eight cortical networks in a longitudinal resting-state fMRI study of adolescent twins and their older siblings on two occasions (mean ages 13 and 18 years). We modelled the reliability for these inherently noisy and head-motion sensitive measurements by analyzing data from split-half sessions. Functional connectivity between resting-state networks decreased with age whereas functional connectivity within resting-state networks generally increased with age, independent of general cognitive functioning. Sex effects were sparse, with stronger functional connectivity in the default mode network for girls compared to boys, and stronger functional connectivity in the salience network for boys compared to girls. Heritability explained up to 53% of the variation in functional connectivity within and between resting-state networks, and common environment explained up to 33%. Genetic influences on functional connectivity remained stable during adolescent development. In conclusion, longitudinal age-related changes in functional connectivity within and between cortical resting-state networks are subtle but wide-spread throughout adolescence. Genes play a considerable role in explaining individual variation in functional connectivity with mostly stable influences throughout adolescence.
Highlights
The human brain is active during rest (Biswal et al, 1995, 1997)
The remaining connections with genetic of common environmental influences at both ages do not reveal any significant dynamics in heritability or common environment (Supplementary Table S6). These results should be interpreted with caution due to limited power to detect significant genetic or environmental estimates at age 13 years, in part due to the reduced sample size at age 13 years. With this longitudinal resting-state fMRI study, we measured the heritability of functional connectivity throughout adolescent development for the first time
Functional connectivity between resting-state networks decreases with age, whereas functional connectivity within cortical restingstate networks increases with age, except for several connections within the salience network that decrease with age
Summary
The human brain is active during rest (Biswal et al, 1995, 1997). Data-driven approaches have been applied to resting-state functional MRI scans to obtain spatial patterns of temporally coherent signals that divide the brain into distinct intrinsic functional networks (DeLuca et al, 2005; Fox et al, 2005; Power et al, 2011; van den Heuvel and Hulshoff Pol, 2010; Yeo et al, 2011). The executive control network (ECN) matures later on in life, in line with the protracted development of executive functions during childhood and adolescence (Gilmore et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2017) These functional networks can be reliably identified in children and adolescents aged 9–15 years for both short-term (i.e. consecutive scan sessions) and long-term repeated measures at 2.5 years interval (Thomason et al, 2011). By adolescence, these spatially distributed and functionally linked brain regions that share information already closely resemble their adult state
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