Andy’s Quick Hits (202): Growth and decline of your brain over your life

So, we all know that our brain grows very quickly as babies and children and then after a certain age, younger than some of us may like to think, there begins a slow decline. But precisely what and how is the question.

Well, this is a question that an international collaboration of researchers coordinated by the University of Cambridge set out to answer. They analysed over 125,000 brain scans from over 100 studies and have built brain charts form a 15-week old foetus to a hundred year-old. This gives new unprecedented insight into the changes in the human brain over a lifetime. Some key milestones in brain development are:

• The volume of grey matter (brain cells) increases rapidly from mid-gestation onwards, peaking just before we are six years old. It then begins to decrease slowly.
• Grey matter volume in the subcortex (which controls bodily functions and basic behaviour) peaks in adolescence at 14-and-a-half years old.
• The volume of white matter (brain connections) also increased rapidly from mid-gestation through early childhood and peaks just before we are 29 years old.
• The decline in white matter volume begins to accelerate after 50 years.