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Estimated Gray Matter Volume Rapidly Changes after a Short Motor Task

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What are your participants doing while youacquire the anatomical MRI brain scans? Our latest show that estimated gray matter volume (GMV) rapidly changes after a 2-minute short motor task (t.ly/gFwU) Does this common estimate really represent GMV?

 

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We acquired up to 14 T1-weighted and 8 BOLD-fMRI images from 51 subjects while resting or performing a finger-tapping task (FTT; á 2 min) for 30 or 60 minutes.

 

 

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Estimated GMV decreased in motor regions during FTT compared with rest. These effects in motor cortex were specific to taskexecution, and differed from time-related GMV changes occurring over 30 to 60 min of FTT exercise. Are these rapid GMV changes BOLD-related?

 

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Task-related motor cortex BOLD signals did notoverlap nor correlate with any effects observed on T1-w GMV estimates, evincing that BOLD signals cannot fully explain the rapid task-induced changes in estimated GMV.

 

Estimates of GMV were not related to behavioural performance, but cerebellum neural response changes (BOLD) were related to FTT improvements. 

 

We previously showed that passive image viewinglead to enlargements in visual cortex GMV (t.ly/8zJZ). Here, an active finger-tapping task induced motorcortex GMV changes and we conclude that behavior-related GMV changes may poseserious questions to reproducibility across studies.

 

Shout out to all co-authors and collaboration at Kaorlinska Institutet, Unversity of Gothenburg, and Stockholm University.

 

Olivo, G., Lövdén, M., Manzouri, A., Terlau, L., Jenner, B., Jafari, A., Petersson, S., Li, T.-Q., Fischer, H., & Månsson, K. N. T. (2022). Estimated Gray Matter Volume Rapidly Changes after a Short Motor Task. Cerebral Cortex.