Gestational and postnatal age associations for striatal tissue iron deposition in early infancy.

Striatal development is crucial for later motor, cognitive, and reward behavior, but age-related change in striatal physiology during the neonatal period remains understudied. An MRI-based measure of tissue iron deposition, T2*, is a non-invasive way to probe striatal physiology neonatally, linked to dopaminergic processing and cognition in children and adults. Striatal subregions have distinct functions that may come online at different time periods in early life. To identify if there are critical periods before or after birth, we measured if striatal iron accrued with gestational age at birth [range= 34.57-41.85 weeks] or postnatal age at scan [range= 5-64 days], using MRI to probe the T2* signal in N = 83 neonates in three striatal subregions. We found iron increased with postnatal age in the pallidum and putamen but not the caudate. No significant relationship between iron and gestational age was observed. Using a subset of infants scanned at preschool age (N = 26), we show distributions of iron shift between time points. In infants, the pallidum had the least iron of the three regions but had the most by preschool age. Together, this provides evidence of distinct change for striatal subregions, a possible differentiation between motor and cognitive systems, identifying a mechanism that may impact future trajectories.

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Damien Fair reports a relationship with Turing Medical Inc that includes: employment and equity or stocks. Damien Fair has patent issued to Framewise Integrated Real-Time Motion Monitoring (FIRMM) software. Damien A. Fair is a patent holder on the Framewise Integrated Real-Time Motion Monitoring (FIRMM) software. He is also a co-founder of Turing Medical Inc. The nature of this financial interest and the design of the study have been reviewed by two committees at the University of Minnesota. They have put in place a plan to help ensure that this research study is not affected by the financial interest.