Brain Developmental Trajectories in Children and Young Adults with Isolated Cleft Lip and/or Cleft Palate

ABSTRACT

The present study evaluated brain development in persons with isolated cleft lip and/or cleft palate (iCL/P) compared to unaffected controls using an accelerated longitudinal design. A sample of 134 males and females, ages 7–27 years, with iCL/P (184 observations, total) was compared to 144 unaffected controls (208 evaluations, total) on Wechsler Index scores and volumetric data from structural MRI scans. Boys with isolated cleft palate had verbal IQ 15.5 points lower than perceptual IQ; a clinically significant difference. Participants with iCL/P had differential growth trajectories of regional cerebrum matter and consistently lower volumes of cerebellar gray matter and subcortical matter.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Peg Nopoulos for permitting us to use data from her grant to conduct this study. We would also like to thank Dr. Ian DeVolder for his initial work on this project and continued support in finalizing the dataset and analyses.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers K23 DE024511 (Dr. Conrad, PI), UL1TR002537, and R01 DEO14399 (Dr. Peg Nopoulos, PI)]. This work was conducted on an MRI instrument funded by 1S10OD025025. National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences [UL1TR002537]; National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research [K23 DE024511, R01 DEO14399]; Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health (OD) [1S10OD02502501];