ArticleNeuroImage2021
Inter-individual variability in structural brain development from late childhood to young adulthood.
Article in NeuroImage, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Associations between Neuroimaging Measures and Cognitive Performance in Children, Adolescents, and Youth Living With HIV-a Systematic Review.Current HIV/AIDS reports · 2025Pooled it
- The Dynamic Interplay Between Puberty and Structural Brain Development as a Predictor of Mental Health Difficulties in Adolescence: A Systematic Review.Biological psychiatry · 2024Pooled it
- The Transdiagnostic Association Between Childhood Trauma and Accelerated Brain Aging in Two Independent Datasets.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- Article
- Sleep as a moderator of adolescent brain development-evidence from a longitudinal MRI study.Sleep · 2026Article
- Bridging the gap: Translating fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging insights into clinical practice.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Timing and tempo of puberty and neurodevelopment following adversity: A registered report.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- From Developmental Timing to Clinical Visibility: An Integrative Narrative Review of Sex-Related Neurocognitive Development.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Brain charts for neuroanatomical sex differences across the human lifespan.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Individual differences in adolescent cortical development are associated with neighborhood characteristics: Longitudinal findings from the ABCD study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Structural Brain Correlates of Childhood Inhibited Temperament: An ENIGMA-Anxiety Mega-Analysis.Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · 2026Article
- A Systematic Evaluation of the Performance of Multiple Brain Age Algorithms in Two Cohorts of Youth.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Independent brain cortical signatures of risk for adolescent cannabis use and consequences of such use are moderated by sex.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Neuroanatomical correlates of psychiatric manifestations in Wilson disease: the role of age.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Consensus statement on developmentally appropriate policy and practice for adolescents in foster care.Children and youth services review · 2025Article
- Individual Differences in Developmental Trajectories of Global and Subcortical Brain Volumes Between Late Childhood and Late Adolescence: Findings From a 12-Wave Neuroimaging Study.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Heterogeneous, temporally consistent, and plastic brain development after preterm birth.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal Patterns in Cortical Development: Age, Puberty, and Individual Variability from 9 to 13 Years of Age.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Hidden Rhythms of a Developing Brain: Multimetric rs-fMRI Insights Into Typical Youth Maturation.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Current challenges and future directions for brain age prediction in children and adolescents.Nature communications · 2025Review
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A fundamental task in neuroscience is to characterize the brain's developmental course. While replicable group-level models of structural brain development from childhood to adulthood have recently been identified, we have yet to quantify and understand individual differences in structural brain development. The present study examined inter-individual variability and sex differences in changes in brain structure, as assessed by anatomical MRI, across ages 8.0-26.0 years in 269 participants (149 females) with three time points of data (807 scans), drawn from three longitudinal datasets collected in the Netherlands, Norway, and USA. We further investigated the relationship between overall brain size and developmental changes, as well as how females and males differed in change variability across development. There was considerable inter-individual variability in the magnitude of changes observed for all examined brain measures. The majority of individuals demonstrated decreases in total gray matter volume, cortex volume, mean cortical thickness, and white matter surface area in mid-adolescence, with more variability present during the transition into adolescence and the transition into early adulthood. While most individuals demonstrated increases in white matter volume in early adolescence, this shifted to a majority demonstrating stability starting in mid-to-late adolescence. We observed sex differences in these patterns, and also an association between the size of an individual's brain structure and the overall rate of change for the structure. The present study provides new insight as to the amount of individual variance in changes in structural morphometrics from late childhood to early adulthood in order to obtain a more nuanced picture of brain development. The observed individual- and sex-differences in brain changes also highlight the importance of further studying individual variation in developmental patterns in healthy, at-risk, and clinical populations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.