Developmental Stuttering: MRI Studies in Children

描述（由申请人提供）：有令人信服的新证据表明，患有持续性发展性口吃（PDS）的成年人在容积核磁共振成像（volume - metric MRI）上有先天性言语、语言和运动区域的异常解剖，但这些成像方法尚未用于研究患有和不患有口吃的儿童。由于最近强有力的证据表明，PDS儿童可能与短暂发展性口吃（TDS）儿童在遗传上不同，因此研究这两组儿童很重要，因为尚不清楚他们在脑形态方面是否也具有生物学上的差异。本项目的主要目的是使用体内体积MRI方法研究PDS儿童（n=30）、TDS儿童（n=30）和正常流利儿童（n=30）的语音、语言和运动区域，这些儿童的性别、利手性、年龄和教育程度相匹配。本研究将研究由外部语言回路和内部语音-运动回路构成的口吃模型所涉及的兴趣区域（R0ls），包括：(1)

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There is compelling new evidence that adults with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) have anomalous anatomy in perisylvian speech, language, and motor areas on volumetric MRI, but these imaging methods have not been used to study children who do and do not stutter. Because of recent strong evidence that children with PDS are likely to be genetically different from children with transient developmental stuttering (TDS), it is important to study these two groups as it is unclear whether they are also biologically distinct in terms of brain morphology. The major aim of this project is to use in vivo volumetric MRI methods to study speech, language, and motor regions in children with PDS (n=30), children with TDS (n=30) and normally fluent children (n=30) matched for sex, handedness, age, and education. Regions of interest (R0ls) implicated by a model of stuttering positing an outer linguistic and an inner phonological-motor loop will be studied, including: (1) perisylvian speech-language areas (outer linguistic loop), and (2) cortical-subcortical motor areas (inner phonatory loop). It is hypothesized that asymmetry patterns of perisylvian and motor regions will be disrupted in children who stutter, and anomalous anatomy defined as altered volumes and disturbed gyral patterns may dissociate the children with TDS from those with PDS and from controls. It is unclear, however, whether the PDS group will have distinct anatomic features compared to the TDS group, or whether the PDS group will have more anatomic anomalies compared to the TDS group. Anatomical regions may deviate in concert, suggesting a severity effect, or specific regions may deviate independently, suggesting that multiple combinations result in stuttering. We will investigate whether specific regions are more likely to be atypical in severely dysfluent subjects, or whether specific configurations are associated with specific stuttering symptoms or with measures of speech motor control. We are also interested in whether there are distinct anatomical features within subgroups based on sex, and hand preference, because we found important differences in adults with PDS based on these variables. These proposed studies will provide a biological framework to learn more about brain morphology in children who do and do not stutter, provide information to develop targeted behavioral and pharmacological interventions, and may lead to earlier detection of children at risk for developmental stuttering.