An international team of researchers has created a series of brain charts spanning entire lifespan — from a 15-week-old foetus to a 100-year-old adult — that show how human brains expand rapidly in early life and gradually shrink as they age.
The charts are the result of a research project spanning six continents and bringing together almost 1,25,000 brain scans (MRIs) from over a 100 different studies. Authored by Richard Bethlehem from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and Jakob Seidlitz from the Lifespan Brain Institute at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania, the study has been published online in Nature on April 6.
Indian researchers, from the Consortium on Vulnerability to Externalising Disorders and Addictions [cVEDA] led by scientists from NIMHANS — Bharath Holla from the Department of Integrative Medicine and Vivek Benegal from the Department of Psychiatry — contributed the Indian dataset to this collaboration.
