New research has revealed the cerebellum supports cognitive and social functions, in addition to motor control and balance. (Ekaterina Bolovtsova/Pexels)
New research has revealed the cerebellum supports cognitive and social functions, in addition to motor control and balance. (Ekaterina Bolovtsova/Pexels) Will allow clinicians to track neural development across human lifespan for first time A team led by Western neuroscientist Jörn Diedrichsen has received $1 million in funding from the Once Upon a Time Foundation to develop a growth chart for the human cerebellum across an entire lifespan from birth to 80 years. The cerebellum is the part of the brain that was historically thought to be primarily responsible for motor control and balance. New research has revealed it supports cognitive and social functions as well, and cerebellar dysfunction has been linked to conditions such as autism, dyslexia and schizophrenia. The growth chart will allow clinicians for the first time to track neural development across a lifespan, providing a framework for diagnosis and prognosis. Over the next three years, Diedrichsen and his collaborators will create an analytics pipeline that will estimate the volume of different parts of the cerebellum from individual MRI scans, include those from full-term and pre-term infants, and provide age-dependent norms of what constitutes normal development. This pipeline will allow clinicians around the world to estimate the influence of specific clinical risk factors informed by a large population of children who developed neurologically in expected ways.
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