Prenatal processes are likely critical for the differences in cognitive ability and disease risk that unfold in postnatal life. Prenatally established cortical folding patterns are increasingly studied as an adult proxy for earlier development events – under the as yet untested assumption that an individual's folding pattern is developmentally fixed. Here, we provide the first empirical test of this stability assumption using 263 longitudinally-acquired structural MRI brain scans from 75 typically developing individuals spanning ages 7 to 32 years. We focus on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) – an intensely studied cortical region that presents two qualitatively distinct and reliably classifiable sulcal patterns with links to postnatal behavior. We show – without exception–that individual ACC sulcal patterns are fixed from childhood to adulthood, at the same time that quantitative anatomical ACC metrics are undergoing profound developmental change. Our findings buttress use of folding typology as a postnatally-stable marker for linking variations in early brain development to later neurocognitive outcomes in ex utero life.

产前过程对于产后生活中认知能力和疾病风险的差异可能至关重要。越来越多的研究将产前确定的皮质折叠模式作为成人早期发展事件的依据-在尚未经过测试的假设下，即个体的折叠模式在发展上是固定的。在这里，我们使用来自75位年龄在7至32岁之间的典型发育个体的263条纵向获取的结构MRI脑部扫描，提供了这种稳定性假设的首次实证检验。我们着眼于前扣带回皮质（ACC）–一项经过深入研究的皮质区域，呈现出两个定性不同且可靠分类的沟纹模式，这些模式与产后行为有关。我们无一例外地表明，从童年到成年，个体的ACC沟渠模式都是固定的，与此同时，定量的ACC解剖学指标正在发生深刻的发展变化。我们的研究结果支持使用折叠类型学作为出生后稳定的标记，将早期大脑发育的变化与晚期神经认知结局联系起来。宫外生活。