What is gray matter volume?
Grey matter is abundant in the cerebrum, cerebellum, brain stem, and the spinal cord. The sheet of grey matter that constitutes the cerebrum varies in thickness from about 2 to 5mm. In the cerebellum, which makes up just 10% of the brain’s volume, contains more neuronal cell bodies than the rest of the brain combined.
What is a grey matter definition?
Definition of gray matter 1 : neural tissue especially of the brain and spinal cord that contains nerve-cell bodies as well as nerve fibers and has a brownish-gray color.
What is white matter volume?
Significance. The white matter of the cerebral cortex contains all axons that support long-range cortical connectivity and increases faster in volume than the gray matter, which contains the connected cortical neuronal cell bodies.
What factors affect grey matter volume?
2. Regional gray matter volume
- 2.1. Main effect of age. All gray matter regions showed significant main effects of age, with age-related volume decline in all gray matter regions.
- 2.2. Interaction of age × gender.
- 2.3. The interaction of age × hemisphere.
- 2.4. Interaction of age × gender × hemisphere.
What is grey matter density?
Abstract. Developmental structural neuroimaging studies in humans have long described decreases in gray matter volume (GMV) and cortical thickness (CT) during adolescence. Gray matter density (GMD), a measure often assumed to be highly related to volume, has not been systematically investigated in development.
What is grey matter and white matter?
The gray matter is the areas where the actual “processing” is done whereas the white matter provides the communication between different gray matter areas and between the gray matter and the rest of the body. The neurons in the gray matter consist of neuronal cell bodies and their dendrites.
What is gray matter made up of?
What is gray matter? Gray matter consists primarily of neuronal cell bodies, or soma. This a spherical structure that houses the neuron’s nucleus.
What does increased gray matter mean?
An increase in activity can depict the utilization of more regions/connections whereas a decrease can indicate efficiency. Meaning that both an increase and a decrease in activity can indicate learning improvements. The same could be true for gray-matter plasticity.
What does decreased gray matter volume mean?
The most consistent observation is a decrease in grey matter volume in the medial prefrontal cortex. These findings are important as the medial prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in emotional and cognitive processing in chronic pain.
How are gray matter and white matter arranged in the CNS?
White matter is found buried in the inner layer of the brain’s cortex, while the grey matter is mainly located on the surface of the brain. The spinal cord is arranged in the opposite way, with grey matter found deep inside its core and the insulating white matter wrapped around the outside.
Why is grey matter Unmyelinated?
This increased surface area is crucial for effective functioning as more neurons can be present in contrast to a brain with a flat surface. Besides this group of neuronal cells, the axons of grey matter are not heavily myelinated, unlike white matter, which contains a high concentration of myelin.