Lisa Bartha-Doering

Mens inversus in corpore inverso? Language lateralization in a boy with situs inversus totalis

Situs inversus totalis is a rare condition where the visceral organs are organized as a mirror image of default organ position. In this study we picture the co-development between brain and visceral organs in a case of situs inversus totalis from a fetal stage to adolescence and compare our findings to an age-, gender-, and education-matched control with normal position of thoracic and abdominal organs. We show that in this case of situs inversus, functional and structural brain lateralization do not coincide with visceral organ situs. Furthermore, cognitive development in situs inversus is normal. To our knowledge, this is the first report of antenatal cerebral origins of structural and functional brain asymmetry in a case of situs inversus totalis.

Care of girls and women with Turner syndrome: beyond growth and hormones

Turner syndrome (TS), although considered a rare disease, is the most common sex chromosome abnormality in women, with an incident of 1 in 2500 female births. TS is characterized by distinctive physical features such as short stature, ovarian dysgenesis, an increased risk for heart and renal defects as well as a specific cognitive and psychosocial phenotype. Given the complexity of the condition, patients face manifold difficulties which increase over the lifespan. Furthermore, failures during the transitional phase to adult care result in moderate health outcomes and decreased quality of life. Guidelines on the optimal screening procedures and medical treatment are easy to find. However, recommendations for the treatment of the incriminating psychosocial aspects in TS are scarce. In this work, we first reviewed the literature on the cognitive and psychosocial development of girls with TS compared with normal development, from disclosure to young adulthood, and then introduce a psychosocial approach to counseling and treating patients with TS, including recommendations for age-appropriate psychological diagnostics. With this work, we aim to facilitate the integration of emphasized psychosocial care in state-of-the-art treatment for girls and women with TS.

Intrafamilial phenotypic variability of Specific Language Impairment.

We investigated language functions in 32 members of a four generation family with several members affected by Specific Language Impairment with an extensive language test battery in order to determine the prevalence, overlap, and homogeneity of linguistic deficits within one pedigree. In sum, one fourth of all family members tested fulfilled the criteria of Specific Language Impairment. Despite of some similarities in language abilities, different combinations of language deficits were observed, and individual language profiles varied substantially. Thus, though there is a high prevalence of language deficits in this family which raises the likelihood of a genetic origin of these deficits, and though all affected study participants displayed selective linguistic deficits with normal non-verbal functioning, language testing showed considerable variance in overlap and homogeneity of linguistic deficits. Thus, even in one genetic population, an underlying linguistic disorder manifests itself in different language abilities to a variant degree.

Atypical language representation is unfavorable for language abilities following childhood stroke

Brain plasticity has often been quoted as a reason for the more favorable outcome in childhood stroke compared to adult stroke. We investigated the relationship between language abilities and language localization in childhood stroke. Seventeen children and adolescents with left- or right-sided ischemic stroke and 18 healthy controls were tested with a comprehensive neurolinguistic test battery, and the individual neural representation of language was measured with an fMRI language paradigm. Overall, 12 of 17 stroke patients showed language abilities below average, and five patients exhibited impaired language performance. fMRI revealed increased activity in right hemisphere areas homotopic to left hemisphere language regions. In sum, seven stroke patients revealed atypical, i.e. bilateral or right lateralized language representation. Typical left hemispheric language lateralization was associated with better performance in naming and word fluency, whereas increased involvement of right homologues was accompanied by worse language outcome. In contrast, lesion lateralization or lesion volume did not correlate with language outcome or atypical language lateralization. Thus, atypical language lateralization is unfavorable for language outcome, and right homologues do not have the same cognitive capacity, even in young children.

Weaker semantic language lateralization associated with better semantic language performance in healthy right-handed children

Abstract Introduction The relationship between language abilities and language lateralization in the developing brain is important for our understanding of the neural architecture of language development. Methods We investigated 35 right‐handed children and adolescents aged 7–16 years with a functional magnetic resonance imaging language paradigm and a comprehensive language and verbal memory examination. Results We found that less lateralized language was significantly correlated with better language performance across areas of the brain and across different language tasks. Less lateralized language in the overall brain was associated with better in‐scanner task accuracy on a semantic language decision task and out‐of‐scanner vocabulary and verbal fluency. Specifically, less lateralized frontal lobe language dominance was associated with better in‐scanner task accuracy and out‐of‐scanner verbal fluency. Furthermore, less lateralized parietal language was associated with better out‐of‐scanner verbal memory across learning, short‐ and long‐delay trials. In contrast, we did not find any relationship between temporal lobe language laterality and verbal performance. Conclusions This study suggests that semantic language performance is better with some involvement of the nondominant hemisphere.

When two are better than one: Bilateral mesial temporal lobe contributions associated with better vocabulary skills in children and adolescents

HighlightsHealthy children and adolescents exhibit mesial temporal lobe activations during semantic language processing.Bilateral mesial temporal lobe involvement is advantageous for vocabulary skills in healthy, right‐handed children and adolescents.Thus, the mesial temporal lobes of both hemispheres play an important role in language functioning in right‐handed children and adolescents. Abstract This study considered the involvement of the mesial temporal lobe (MTL) in language and verbal memory functions in healthy children and adolescents. We investigated 30 healthy, right‐handed children and adolescents, aged 7–16, with a fMRI language paradigm and a comprehensive cognitive test battery. We found significant MTL activations during language fMRI in all participants; 63% of them had left lateralized MTL activations, 20% exhibited right MTL lateralization, and 17% showed bilateral MTL involvement during the fMRI language paradigm. Group analyses demonstrated a strong negative correlation between the lateralization of MTL activations and language functions. Specifically, children with less lateralized MTL activation showed significantly better vocabulary skills. These findings suggest that the mesial temporal lobes of both hemispheres play an important role in language functioning, even in right‐handers. Our results furthermore show that bilateral mesial temporal lobe involvement is advantageous for vocabulary skills in healthy, right‐handed children and adolescents.

Tracing the structural origins of atypical language representation: consequences of prenatal mirror-imaged brain asymmetries in a dizygotic twin couple

We investigated the predictive value of prenatal superior temporal sulcus (STS) depth asymmetry in a special case of a female dizygotic twin that showed inverted prenatal asymmetry of this structure. For this purpose, we performed a follow-up investigation in this former fetus at the age of seven, where we assessed the functional language lateralization using task-based and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As control group we employed her twin brother, who showed a typical folding pattern prenatally, as well as a complementary set of four age-matched children that had fetal MRI of their brains and typical STS depth asymmetry. We could show that the twin with the atypical fetal asymmetry of the STS also showed significantly differing rightward language lateralization in the frontal and temporal lobes. Additionally, resting-state data suggest a stronger connectivity between inferior frontal gyri in this case. The twin showed normal cognitive development. This result gives a first glimpse into the STS’ atypical asymmetry being a very early morphological marker for later language lateralization.

Multivariate Manifold Modelling of Functional Connectivity in Developing Language Networks

There is an increasing consensus in the scientific and medical communtities that functional brain analysis should be conducted from a connectionist standpoint. Most connectivity studies to date rely on derived measures of graph properties. In this paper, we show that brain networks can be analyzed effectively by considering them as elements of the Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices \(\text {Sym}^+\). Using recently proposed methods for manifold multivariate linear modelling, we analyze the developing functional connectivity of a small cohort of children aged 6 to 13 of both genders with strongly varying handedness indices at both rest and task simultaneously. We show that even with small sample sizes we can obtain results that reflect findings on large cohorts, and that \(\text {Sym}^+\) is a better framework for analyzing functional brain connectivity compared to Euclidean space.

Assessing Reorganisation of Functional Connectivity in the Infant Brain

As maturation of neural networks continues throughout childhood, brain lesions insulting immature networks have different impact on brain function than lesions obtained after full network maturation. Thus, longitudinal studies and analysis of spatial and temporal brain signal correlations are a key component to get a deeper understanding of individual maturation processes, their interaction and their link to cognition. Here, we assess the connectivity pattern deviation of developing resting state networks after ischaemic stroke of children between 7 and 17 years. We propose a method to derive a reorganisational score to detect target regions for overtaking affected functional regions within a stroke location. The evaluation is performed using rs-fMRI data of 16 control subjects and 16 stroke patients. The developing functional connectivity affected by ischaemic stroke exhibits significant differences to the control cohort. This suggests an influence of stroke location and developmental stage on regenerating processes and the reorganisational patterns.