Human brain develops well past adolescence - study

While professionals worldwide believed that that the human brain development stopped in the adolescent years, the findings of a new study reveal that they might continue well into our 20s.

“This is the first long-range study, using a type of imaging that looks at brain wiring, to show that in the white matter there are still structural changes happening during young adulthood,” Catherine Lebel, a doctoral student from University of Alberta in Canada.

She added, “The white matter is the wiring of the brain; it connects different regions to facilitate cognitive abilities. So the connections are strengthening as we age in young adulthood.”

The study
For the study, researchers led Christian Beaulieu, a biomedical engineering researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, enrolled 103 healthy people, aged between five and 32.

All participants went through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique used to scan the brains, twice during the course of the study.

Development continuing into adulthood observed
Comparisons of brain scans revealed that parts of the brain continued to develop well past adolescence, researchers revealed.

The wiring the frontal lobe, area of the brain responsible for complex cognitive tasks, continued well into 20s, researchers found.

Though the exact reasons behind ongoing brain development well into young adulthood are not known, researchers believe that the plethora of life experiences like education, independence, establishing a new career, social or family life may be affecting the brain’s hard-core functioning.

Another key observation that emerged in a smaller sample base comprising of relatively young subjects was the wearing-off of the white matter integrity over time – a characteristic of brain degradation, researchers averred.

The researchers speculate that the signs of brain degradation in brain scans may signify early stages of psychiatric disorders.

“What’s interesting is a lot of psychiatric illness and other disorders emerge during adolescence, so some of the thought might be if certain tracts start to degenerate too soon, it may not be responsible for these disorders, but it may be one of the factors that makes someone more susceptible to developing these disorders,” said Beaulieu.

The findings of the study feature in the Journal of Neuroscience.