Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 8, Issue 1, July 1998, Pages 62-68
NeuroImage

Regular Article
Regional Changes in Glucose Metabolism during Brain Development from the Age of 6 Years

https://doi.org/10.1006/nimg.1998.0346Get rights and content

Abstract

Positron emission tomography (PET) with [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) studies of 42 subjects ages 6 to 38 years were analyzed using statistical parametric mapping to identify age-related changes in regional distribution of glucose metabolism adjusted for global activity. Whereas adults were normal volunteers, children had idiopathic epilepsy. We studied polynomial expansions of age to identify nonlinear effects and found that adjusted glucose metabolism varied very significantly in the thalamus and the anterior cingulate cortex and to a lesser degree in the basal ganglia, the mesencephalon, and the insular, posterior cingulate, frontal, and postcentral cortices. Regression plots showed that the best fit was not linear: adjusted glucose metabolism increased mainly before the age of 25 years and then remained relatively stable. Effects persisted when anti-epileptic drug intake and sleep during the FDG uptake were considered as confounding covariates. To determine if the metabolic changes observed were not due to the epileptic condition of the children, PET data obtained in adults with temporal lobe epilepsy were compared with those in our group of normal adult subjects, resulting in the absence of mapping in the age-related regions. This study suggests that brain maturation from the age of 6 years gives rise to a relative increase of synaptic activities in the thalamus, possibly as a consequence of improved corticothalamic connections. Increased metabolic activity in the anterior cingulate cortex is probably related to these thalamic changes and suggests that the limbic system is involved in the processes of brain maturation.

References (25)

  • C. Büchel et al.

    Nonlinear regression in parametric activation studies

    NeuroImage

    (1996)
  • P. Maquet et al.

    Cerebral glucose utilization during stage 2 sleep in man

    Brain Res.

    (1992)
  • P. Van Bogaert et al.

    Cerebral glucose metabolism and centrotemporal spikes

    Epilepsy Res.

    (1998)
  • J.P. Bourgeois et al.

    Changes of synaptic density in the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey from fetal to adult stage

    J. Neurosci.

    (1993)
  • V.S. Caviness et al.

    The human brain age 7–11 years: A volumetric analysis based on magnetic resonance images

    Cereb. Cortex

    (1996)
  • J.P. Changeux

    Variation and selection in neural function

    Trends Neurosci.

    (1997)
  • H.T. Chugani et al.

    Positron emission tomography study of human brain functional development

    Ann. Neurol.

    (1987)
  • Epilepsia

    (1989)
  • A.S. Dekaban et al.

    Changes in brain weights during the span of human life: Relation of brain weights to body heights and body weights

    Ann. Neurol.

    (1978)
  • O. Devinsky et al.

    Contributions of anterior cingulate cortex to behaviour

    Brain

    (1995)
  • K.J. Friston et al.

    Spatial registration and normalization of images

    Hum. Brain Mapping

    (1995)
  • K.J. Friston et al.

    Detecting activations in PET and fMRI: Levels of inference and power

    NeuroImage

    (1995)
  • Cited by (74)

    • Dose Estimation in Pediatric Nuclear Medicine

      2017, Seminars in Nuclear Medicine
    • Default mode network hypometabolism in epileptic encephalopathies with CSWS

      2014, Epilepsy Research
      Citation Excerpt :

      When compared with the adult control group, the two pediatric epileptic populations studied here showed common decrease in metabolism in various subcortical (caudate nuclei, accumbens, putamen and thalami), cortical and cerebellar areas. These cortical and subcortical hypometabolism are in close anatomical correspondence with those reported in a previous study that investigated the age-related changes in relative glucose metabolism from childhood to adulthood using a group of children with idiopathic rolandic epilepsy and a group of healthy adults (Van Bogaert et al., 1998). These regional metabolic differences between pediatric epileptic and adult populations might either be related to an effect of epilepsy or epileptic activity per se on regional brain glucose metabolism, or to age-related maturational processes.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text