The human brain starts with a bang and ends with a whimper.
That’s the conclusion of a project that used more than 120,000 brain scans to chart the organ’s changes throughout the lifespan. The results appear in the April 6 issue of the journal Nature.
Among the key findings:
- The brain reaches 80% of its maximum size by age 3.
- The volume of gray matter, which represents brain cells, peaks before age 6.
- The volume of white matter — a way of measuring the connections between brain cells — peaks before age 29.
- The loss of white matter accelerates after age 50.
The ongoing study could eventually lead to brain growth charts that would allow doctors to look for signs of atypical development in young patients. But for now, the results are meant for scientists who study typical brain growth or brain disorders like schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
One goal is to “use this huge amount of existing data to help understand and treat psychiatric diseases,” says one of the study’s authors Dr. Aaron Alexander-Bloch, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
