%0 Journal Article
%A Froudist Walsh, Sean
%A Karolis, Vyacheslav
%A Caldinelli, Chiara
%A Brittain, Philip J.
%A Kroll, Jasmin
%A Rodríguez Toscano, Elisa
%A Tesse, Marcelo
%A Colquhoun, Matthew
%A Howes, Oliver
%A Dell' Acqua, Flavio
%A Thiebaut de Schotten, Michel
%A Murray, Robin M.
%A Williams, Steven C.R.
%A Nosarti, Chiara
%T Very early brain damage leads to remodeling of the working memory system in adulthood: A combined fMRI/ Tractography study
%D 2015
%@ 1529-2401
%@ 0270-6474
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/113014
%X The human brain can adapt to overcome injury even years after an initial insult. One hypothesis states that early brain injury survivors,by taking advantage of critical periods of high plasticity during childhood, should recover more successfully than those who suffer injurylater in life. This hypothesis has been challenged by recent studies showing worse cognitive outcome in individuals with early brain injury,compared with individuals with later brain injury, with working memory particularly affected. We invited individuals who sufferedperinatal brain injury (PBI) for an fMRI/diffusion MRI tractography study of working memory and hypothesized that, 30 years after theinitial injury, working memory deficits in the PBI group would remain, despite compensatory activation in areas outside the typicalworking memory network. Furthermore we hypothesized that the amount of functional reorganization would be related to the level ofinjury to the dorsal cingulum tract, which connects medial frontal and parietal working memory structures. We found that adults whosuffered PBI did not significantly differ from controls in working memory performance. They exhibited less activation in classic frontoparietalworking memory areas and a relative overactivation of bilateral perisylvian cortex compared with controls. Structurally, thedorsal cingulum volume and hindrance-modulated orientational anisotropy was significantly reduced in the PBI group. Furthermorethere was uniquely in the PBI group a significant negative correlation between the volume of this tract and activation in the bilateralperisylvian cortex and a positive correlation between this activation and task performance. This provides the first evidence of compensatoryplasticity of the working memory network following PBI.
%~