Scientists have developed a scan that can measure the maturity of the brain, an advance that one day might be useful for testing whether children are maturing normally and gauging whether teenagers are grown up enough to be treated as adults.
A federally funded study that involved scanning more than 12,000 connections in the brains of 238 volunteers ages 7-30 found that the technique appeared to accurately differentiate between the brains of adults and children and determine roughly where individuals scored in the normal trajectory of brain development.
While much more work is needed to validate and refine the test, the technique could have a host of uses, including providing another way to track children to make sure their brains are developing properly in the same way doctors routinely measure other developmental milestones.
The scan could, for example, identify children who might be at risk for autism, schizophrenia and other problems because their brains are not maturing normally.
“Sort of the future”
“If you are worried about a kid’s development, in five minutes you could do a scan and it would spit out a measurement of their brain maturity level,” said Nico Dosenbach, a pediatric neurology resident at St. Louis Children’s Hospital who helped develop the technique described in today’s issue of the journal Science. “That’s sort of the future.”
But the test might be open to premature use or abuse, experts warn. Will overly anxious or competitive parents demand their children be tested to see how they score compared with their peers, or to help them decide whether they are mature enough, for example, to leave home for college? Will online dating services offer brain scans rating the maturity of potential mates? Will defense lawyers try to use it to prove their clients are too immature to be tried as adults? And will prosecutors cite scans as evidence that juveniles are mature enough to be charged as adults?
High-tech polygraphs
Lawyers have already tried to use other types of brain scans as high-tech lie-detector tests even though scientists think the scans are far from ready.
“I could imagine someone taking a minor who would have been charged under one set of law and say, ‘No, look, they have a brain that has greater maturity and we should try them as adults,’ ” said Joseph Fins, chief of the division of medical ethics at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “I’m concerned about the potential misuse of the nascent technology.”
Fins and other experts noted that the public has a tendency to oversimplify and exaggerate the power of brain scans.
“Ultimately, the question for all these kinds of studies is: Does the brain imaging tell us more than we would learn by observing or asking or examining the participants,” said Anjan Chatterjee, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Maybe this represents a step towards that possibility, but we are not there yet.”
