Pubertal variability in patterns of neurodevelopment during early adolescence

Physical and hormonal changes that occur with puberty influence patterns of neuromaturation (Herting & Sowell, 2017). Further, human neuroimaging research suggests that neuromaturation progresses from unimodal, sensorimotor areas to higher-order association areas (i.e. SA-axis) (Gogtay & Thompson, 2010) and that deviations from this axis may be related to risk for psychopathology (Sydnor et al., 2021). We have previously uncovered increasing variability in brain development as puberty progresses during early adolescence (Bottenhorn et al., 2023), when risk for psychopathology is at its highest (Solmi et al., 2022). Yet, questions remain as to the potential role of puberty in development along this S-A axis. Here, we assess individual alignment with the proposed S-A axis with respect to pubertal stages in early adolescence using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (ABCD Study^®).

We used longitudinal neuroimaging and survey data from children ages 9-13 years and their caregivers, from the ABCD Study 4.0 data release (http://dx.doi.org/10.15154/1523041), to compare how brain changes align with hypothesized neurodevelopmental axes across Tanner stages, as assessed by the Pubertal Development Scale (Petersen et al., 1988). We assessed neurodevelopment as annualized percent change in brain morphology (N=7116), microarchitecture (N= 6250), and function (N= 4131), and assessed sensorimotor-association axis alignment via Spearman correlations, at α < 0.01, familywise error-rate corrected.

We uncovered substantial heterogeneity in individual brain development along the S-A axis, with most individuals showing no significant alignment. However, alignment with this neurodevelopmental axis differs between pre-, early-, and mid-pubertal individuals, in brain structure but not function. Interestingly, S-A alignment was unrelated to an individuals’ progression through pubertal stages.

Individual variability in neurodevelopment increases into mid puberty and these findings suggest that the spatial pattern of structural, but not functional, neurodevelopment along the S-A axis is partially explained by pubertal stage, but not changes therein. This is potentially due to pubertal measurement error. Additional research is needed to determine implications of these findings for the many researchers using this dataset and studying pubertal neurodevelopment, more broadly.