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Sketchpad Series

Trajectories of thalamic resting state connectivity in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Caroline Ostrand¹ (ostra092@umn.edu), Paul Collins¹, Monica Luciana¹; ¹University of Minnesota

Functional connectivity between the thalamus and cortex is increasingly recognized as important for higher-order cognition. Alterations in the development of thalamo-cortical networks may contribute to the emergence of pathology including schizophrenia. To date, there has been minimal longitudinal research examining normative developmental trajectories of thalamo-cortical resting state networks. The aim of the current study was to characterize age-related changes in resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) between the thalamus (thal) and the frontoparietal (FPN), salience (SN), and default mode (DMN) networks across adolescence. Participants included 2,459 youth (spanning 9 to 15 years of age) with complete resting state data across three waves of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, an epidemiologically-informed consortium study across 21 data collection sites that is following adolescents from age 9 into young adulthood. Mixed-effects models were constructed to examine the functional form of age with rsFC of thal-SN, thal-FPN, and thal-DMN after accounting for head motion, within-subject variance, and study site. Best fitting models were selected using Bayesian Information Criteria. Findings indicated that a linear relationship between age and rsFC was best when modeling thal-SN, thal-FPN, and thal-DMN rsFC. Thal-SN and thal-FPN rsFC significantly decreased with age (p’s <.05), with the most pronounced effect observed for thal-SN (standardized β= -.197, p<.001). These findings suggest that rsFC of thalamocortical networks including the SN and FPN decreases during adolescence with some variation depending on the network examined. Analyses are in progress to associate connectivity patterns with cognitive function.

Topic Area: NEUROANATOMY