Scholten, Chloe; Gilchrist, Courtney; Geeraert, Bryce; McMorris, Carly; Ben Gibbard, W.; Pei, Jacqueline; Beaulieu, Christian; Landman, Bennett; Tortorelli, Christina; Lebel, Catherine. (2026).听.听Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 287, 113318.听
Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) can affect how the brain develops, but its effects on the shape and structure of the brain鈥檚 outer layer, or cortex, are not fully understood. Using MRI scans from 121 people aged 7鈥�21 years, including 56 with PAE, we examined several features of cortical structure and how they changed with age. Youth with PAE showed differences in brain folding, groove depth, and structural complexity in specific brain regions compared with unexposed youth. Some of these features also developed differently with age in the PAE group. Overall, the findings suggest that measures of brain folding, particularly gyrification, may be more sensitive to the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure than commonly studied measures such as cortical thickness.
Fig. 1. A: Distribution of ages for participants with PAE (blue) or unexposed (salmon). MRI scans are represented by dots with horizontal lines connecting scans of the same participant. There are 163 scans (73 PAE) from 123 participants (58 PAE). 84 participants had 1 scan, 38 participants had 2, and 1 participant had 3 scans. Figure was created using ggplot2 in R (). B: Flowchart depicting the number of scans (and participants) at each stage of data acquisition and processing. Note that there were no significant group differences in the quality of T1-weighted data or MaCRUISE segmentations.