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Updated: Jul 2, 2026
Cortical Source Analysis of High-Density EEG Recordings in Children
Published on: June 30, 2014
Decreased parietal cortex activity during mental rotation in children with congenital hypothyroidism
Valeria Blasi1, Roberta Longaretti, Chiara Giovanettoni
1Neuroradiology, CERMAC, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy. blasi.valeria@hsr.it
Insights
Children with congenital hypothyroidism (CH) show impaired visuospatial skills due to altered brain activation patterns. Their brains recruit different regions during mental rotation tasks compared to controls.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Pediatrics
- Radiology
Background:
- Early treated congenital hypothyroidism (CH) is associated with deficits in visuospatial processing.
- Children with CH often struggle with tasks requiring mental object rotation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying visuospatial difficulties in children with CH.
- To compare brain activity during a visuospatial task between children with CH and healthy controls.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to study brain activity.
- A mental rotation task (visuospatial task, VST) was administered to 15 children with CH and 13 age-matched controls.
Main Results:
- Children with CH performed significantly worse on the VST compared to controls.
- fMRI revealed distinct patterns of brain activation: controls showed greater superior parietal cortex activation, while CH children exhibited increased activation in the supplementary motor area (SMA) and somatosensory regions.
- CH children showed greater deactivation in the inferior parietal cortex (Brodmann area 40).
Conclusions:
- Poorer VST performance in CH is linked to reduced activation in visuospatial processing areas.
- CH children may compensate with increased recruitment of brain regions involved in somatosensory information processing.
- Further research is needed to determine if these neural differences represent immaturity or impairment of the developing brain.
Background:
The ability to detect the spatial characteristics of objects and to rotate them mentally is frequently impaired in early treated congenital hypothyroidism (CH) children.
Aims:
To explore the neural substrate of the visuospatial difficulty in children with CH, we studied 15 children with CH (8-10 years) and 13 age-matched control children with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using a mental rotation task (VST).
Results:
Performance at VST was significantly different between the two groups. Moreover, fMRI data showed greater activation in the superior parietal cortex in control children while children with CH had greater activation in the bilateral SMA and the opercular region of the precentral gyrus, the adjacent insula and the left somatosensory parietal cortex. Furthermore, children with CH deactivated the inferior parietal cortex (Brodmann area 40) more than controls.
Conclusion:
We suggest that the poorer performance of children with CH on VST task is related to the decreased activation in brain areas important for the mental representation of the objects' spatial characteristics, with increased recruitment of regions involved in the representation of somatosensory whole-body information. More studies will be necessary to understand if this different effectiveness in VST reflects immaturity of the neural system or its actual impairment.
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