Abstract
Objectives: Corticospinal tract (CST) is the most important tract in motor control. However, there was no study about the change of CST location with aging. In this study, using diffusion tensor tractography (DTT), we attempted to investigate the change of CST location at cortex, corona radiata (CR) and posterior limb of internal capsule (IC) level with aging in typically developing children.Methods: We recruited 76 healthy pediatric subjects (range; 0–19 years). According to the result of DTT, the location of CST at cortex level was classified as follows; prefrontal cortex (PFC), PFC with Premotor cortex (PMC), PMC, PMC with primary motor cortex (M1), M1, M1 with Primary sensory cortex (S1). Anterior-posterior location (%) of CSTs at CR and IC level was also assessed.Results: DTT results about CSTs of 152 hemispheres from 76 subjects were obtained. The most common location of CST projection was M1 area (58.6%) including PMC with M1 (25.7%), M1 (17.8%), and M1 with S1 (15.1%). The mean age of the projection of CST showed considerably younger at anterior cortex than posterior; (PFC; 4.12 years, PFC with PMC; 6.41 years, PMC; 6.72 years, PMC with M1; 9.75 years, M1; 9.85 years, M1 with S1; 12.99 years, S1; 13.75 years). Spearman correlation showed positive correlation between age and the location of CST from anterior to posterior brain cortex (r = 0.368).Conclusion: We demonstrated that the location of CST projection is different with aging. The result of this study can provide the scientific insight to the maturation study in human brain.
Highlights
The corticospinal tract (CST) is the major neural tract in motor function
Several previous studies reported that Corticospinal tract (CST) with different cerebral origin has different characteristics of the motor function, but most studies were postmortem studies which investigated animal brain instead of human brain (Russell and Demyer, 1961; Galea and Darian-Smith, 1994; Oudega et al, 1994; Maier et al, 1997; Dum and Strick, 2002; Martin et al, 2004; Lemon and Griffiths, 2005; Seo and Jang, 2013)
We investigated anatomical change of the CST with aging in typically developing children and adolescents using diffusion tensor tractography (DTT)
Summary
The corticospinal tract (CST) is the major neural tract in motor function. The CST is known to be involved mainly in functional use of distal extremities such as fine motor coordination (Martin, 2005; Baek et al, 2013; Yeo et al, 2014; Chang et al, 2015; Kim et al, 2015). Main cortical origin of CST is the primary motor cortex (M1), but previous studies reported various anatomical origins of CST in cortex level, such as parietal cortex, supplementary motor area (SMA) or premotor cortex Several previous studies reported that CST with different cerebral origin has different characteristics of the motor function, but most studies were postmortem studies which investigated animal brain instead of human brain (Russell and Demyer, 1961; Galea and Darian-Smith, 1994; Oudega et al, 1994; Maier et al, 1997; Dum and Strick, 2002; Martin et al, 2004; Lemon and Griffiths, 2005; Seo and Jang, 2013). DTT could define the anatomical location and somatotopic arrangement of CST in several levels of brain, including subcortical level such as internal capsule (IC) or corona radiata (CR) as well as cortical level (Kumar et al, 2009; Han et al, 2010; Hong et al, 2010; Kwon et al, 2011; Seo et al, 2012)
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