Neuroscientist Jetro J. Tuulari, M.D., Ph.D. is interested in nearly everything that shapes the development of a child’s brain: starting from intergenerational aspects, for instance from the father’s own childhood. Addressing such questions requires large datasets and substantial computing power.
What influences the development of a child’s brain? What role do environmental conditions play, and what can be predicted from genetics?
These are the questions Jetro J. Tuulari has been working on for more than a decade. He leads the FinnBrain Neuroimaging lab that is part of FinnBrain Birth cohort study at the University of Turku.
FinnBrain is a prospective cohort of around 4,000 families from Southwest Finland and Åland. We have performed MRI scans for ca. 200 children at ages two weeks, five years and eleven years of age. The hope is to continue the follow up with later neuroimaging in the coming years.
Tuulari also uses large international datasets, such as the American Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset, in which 12,000 individuals undergo brain imaging annually.
He would prefer datasets that are larger still. “I would like to move from datasets of thousands of people to datasets of tens of thousands.”
Large datasets enable many kinds of research questions to be explored. One of them concerns the relationship between children’s brain development and weight. In his latest study that is available as a preprint, he and his colleagues identified an intriguing correlation: the dynamic properties in well-established functional brain network at ages 9–10 appeared to be associated with current body weight and weight gain later in adolescence.
“Dynamic network properties do not explain the whole phenomenon as they capture around 20 per cent. Even so, that is clearly more than previous models using functional MRI data have found.”
The finding may help identify risk groups.
However, research on weight is only one of Tuulari’s many research topics. Read more about his research here.
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ELIXIR is partly funded by the European Commission