Following cataract removal, some of the brain’s visual pathways seem to be more malleable than previously thought. MIT researchers have shown that children over 7 can learn visual tasks post cataract surgery, challenging the belief that the brain's visual learning period ends at a younger age. Th
MIT neuroscientists discovered anatomical changes that occur in the white matter pathways linking visual-processing areas of the brain in children who have congenital cataracts surgically removed. This image shows the late-visual pathways in the brain. Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News
The findings further support the idea that the window of brain plasticity, for at least some visual tasks, extends much further than previously thought. In the new study, the researchers wanted to explore whether they could detect any anatomical changes in the brain that might correlate with the behavioral changes that they have previously seen in children who received treatment. They scanned 19 participants, ranging in age from 7 to 17 years of age, at several time points after they had surgery to remove congenital cataracts.
“If you see increasing fractional anisotropy and decreasing mean diffusivity, then you can infer that what’s happening is that the nerve fibers are growing in volume and they’re getting more organized in terms of their alignment,” Sinha says. “When we look at the white matter of the brain, then we see precisely these kinds of changes in some of the white matter bundles.”
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