Given the laterality shown by human beings, each brain hemisphere specializes in a number of functions. For example, language is usually focused in the left hemisphere and perception in the right. Children who suffer prenatal or perinatal brain injury with brain haemorrhage develop notable normal cognitive functions in certain areas such as those associated with language skills. One possible explanation for this has been that the brain regions of the unaffected brain hemisphere could replace the functions of the damaged counterpart.

But neurologists find it difficult to determine, after a brain injury, whether changes in neuronal activity are due to damage caused by the injury itself or caused by processes related with the reorganization of the brain after the injury.

A study just published in The Journal of Neuroscience aims precisely to ascertain this. The study was directed by Gustavo Deco, ICREA researcher of the department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC), and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UPF, involving Mohit Adhikari, member of the group and first author of the article, together with researchers from Canada, the USA and Switzerland.

As Deco and Adhikari explain, "in infants with an early diagnosis of injury, we tried to differentiate the causes of changes in neuronal activity after a stroke by studying functional connectivity when the brain is at rest". To carry this out, the researchers used a computational model so that, as Deco adds, "we have been able to simulate a large-scale network consisting of realistic models of locally connected brain areas, through available anatomical brain connectivity models, both of healthy children and children with a medical history of brain injury".

Using this study methodology, the authors found surprisingly that from the empirical data obtained from children with areas damaged by stroke it transpires that the affected parts behave like a healthy brain and not an injured brain, as would be expected.

Therefore, as Deco says, "these results indicate that it is unlikely that the structural damage caused by early brain injury has a sustained adverse impact on the functional connections of the affected areas, at least insofar as the brain in resting state".

Therefore, the study provides evidence of how these areas could continue playing their almost normal role in some areas, such as language despite children having suffered a stroke at an early age.

Reference work:

Mohit H. Adhikari, Anjali Raja Beharelle, Alessandra Griffa, Patric Hagmann, Ana Solodkin, Anthony R. McIntosh, Steven L. Small, Gustavo Deco (2015), " Computational Modelling of Resting-State Activity Demonstrates Markers of Normalcy in Children with Prenatal or Perinatal Stroke ",  The Journal of Neuroscience, 10 June, 35(23):8914 - 8924.

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Gustavo Deco joins a project funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation