MRI AND BRAIN SCANNING TECHNOLOGY

There have been many changes over the centuries in the way doctors diagnosis and treat their patients. Every year, the technology that is available to doctors that helps them better treat their patients and their illnesses. ADHD is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a common learning disability that affects many children. Prosodic processing in humans is speech recognition and understanding of what is being said. Doctors are now using MRI’s to look at how the brain responds to different things people experience in life, and the developing brains of children. Prosodic processing and ADHD are two things that many children experience in their developmental years.

MRI’s or magnetic resonance imaging provides pictures of the brain and other organs inside the body without taking X-rays. These machines have been able to give doctors images of what parts of the brain are working when certain behaviors are being expressed. In most of the studies the doctors used BOLD fMRI’s, which is blood oxygenation level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Some doctors would argue the findings of the study, because of what a MRI picks up on a scan, and how effective they are with the limitations they do have. MRI’s are very sensitive to even the slightest movement during scanning.

Doctors mostly used the BOLD fMRI’s to look at the brains of children with ADHD. They tried to find children that could represent every child that could possibly have the disorder, and they even followed some patients from their childhood into adulthood to study the lasting effects of ADHD and their brains. The total size cerebral volume of ADHD patients is approximately 5 percent smaller than age and gender matched control subjects (Giedd para 5).The corpus callosum is a broad, thick band running from side to side of the brain, and consists of millions and millions of nerve fibers. In many of the ADHD patients studied the corpus callosum was generally found to be smaller. The frontal region of the brain was also found to be slightly asymmetrical, with the right frontal region smaller in boys scanned with ADHD. Most of the images taken of different patients with ADHD found that they did have slightly smaller areas of their brain that were used for different tasks. MRI, as of right now, is not used to diagnose a child as having ADHD or not. Some children may have a history of ADHD symptoms, and not show the usual symptoms on a brain scan. Other children may, in a brain scan have activity that is constant with an ADHD brain and not show symptoms of the disease (Giedd para 21).

The second article is a lab report of a study done on children that is usually tested in adults for speech recognition, also called prosodic processing. Doctors have concluded that children can use prosodic processing from infancy to assist them in decoding words and sentences. There was a study conducted of 284 children from the ages of 5 to 18, where they had their brains scanned to reveal multiple regions of their brain, and note changes in these regions as different task were given to them. Such as decoding a target sentence what was repeated at a low frequency pitch. Prosodic processing can either be cued emotionally, linguistically or via sentence structure. The imaging done revealed that different parts of the brain were responsible for sentence recognition in different age groups. There were similar areas of the brain that responded to the sentence recognition task, but in different age groups of children. Frontal regions of the brain in most of the subjects did not show much activity.

Both of these articles give details on research of two things that affect children, and the way a child learns. Since the use of MRI is not harmful to children because of its lack of ionizing radiation and capacity to provide exquisite anatomical detail, it is a great help to doctors who study their brains. Doctors have been able to see how the brain functions in patients with ADHD, and can start to make an improvement in the way they look for and treat this disease. Doctors still have to study the brain in children a little longer to find out exactly how their brains work and are able to use prosodic processing with learning.

Giedd, Jay N., Johnathan Blumenthal, Elizabeth Molly, and F. Xavier Castellanos. "Brain Imaging of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 931 (2001). 12 Feb 2006 .

Plante, Elena, Scott K. Holland, and Vince J. Schmithorst. "Prosodic Processing By Children: An fMRI Study." Children's ospital Research foundation, The Unviersity of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH USA (2005). 12 Feb 2006 .