Impacts of adrenarcheal DHEA levels on spontaneous cortical activity during development

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Vince Calhoun, Emory University; Samantha H Penhale, Boys Town National Research Hospital; Giorgia Picci, Boys Town National Research Hospital; Lauren R Ott, Boys Town National Research Hospital; Brittany K Taylor, Boys Town National Research Hospital; Michaela R Frenzel, Boys Town National Research Hospital; Jacob A Eastman, Boys Town National Research Hospital; Yu-Ping Wang, Tulane University; Julia M Stephen, Mind Research Network, Albuquerque; Tony W Wilson, Boys Town National Research Hospital
• Language: English
• Date: 2022-10-01
• Publisher: ELSEVIER SCI LTD
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2022 The Authors
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101153
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
• Volume: 57
• Start Page: 101153
• End Page: 101153
• Grant/Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of the USA (#1539067 and #2112455) and the National Institutes of Health (R01-MH121101, R01-MH116782, and P20-GM144641).; The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
• Keywords: FRONTAL-LOBE; SPATIOTEMPORAL OSCILLATORY DYNAMICS; Neurosciences & Neurology; Life Sciences & Biomedicine; Science & Technology; Social Sciences; Spontaneous cortical activity; CONNECTIVITY; Adrenarche; Psychology, Developmental; TESTOSTERONE; Resting-State; BRAIN-DEVELOPMENT; PUBERTY; Neurosciences; Magnetoencephalography (MEG); ASSOCIATIONS; Psychology; Dehydroepiandrosterone; THICKNESS; VOLUME; DEHYDROEPIANDROSTERONE-SULFATE
• Research Categories: Engineering, Biomedical

Abstract

Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) production is closely associated with the first pubertal hormonal event, adrenarche. Few studies have documented the relationships between DHEA and functional brain development, with even fewer examining the associations between DHEA and spontaneous cortical activity during the resting-state. Thus, whether DHEA levels are associated with the known developmental shifts in the brain's idling cortical rhythms remains poorly understood. Herein, we examined spontaneous cortical activity in 71 typically-developing youth (9–16 years; 32 male) using magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG data were source imaged and the power within five canonical frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma) was computed to identify spatially- and spectrally-specific effects of salivary DHEA and DHEA-by-sex interactions using vertex-wise ANCOVAs. Our results indicated robust increases in power with increasing DHEA within parieto-occipital cortices in all frequency bands except alpha, which decreased with increasing DHEA. In the delta band, DHEA and sex interacted within frontal and temporal cortices such that with increasing DHEA, males exhibited increasing power while females showed decreasing power. These data suggest that spontaneous cortical activity changes with endogenous DHEA levels during the transition from childhood to adolescence, particularly in sensory and attentional processing regions. Sexually-divergent trajectories were only observed in later-developing frontal cortical areas.