The study compares kids raised in Romania’s infamous state-run orphanages with kids raised in normal Romanian family homes at the same time. MRI brain scans show that children raised in run-down institutions — typically with just one adult supervisor per 12 young kids — developed measurably lower grey matter volume and white matter volume in the cortex of the brain than children who grew up among their families.
However, children who spent their infancy in the orphanages but were then delivered to high-quality foster care as small children fared somewhat better than those left behind in the institutions. Those kids’ cortical white matter was no different from that among children who had always lived with families, the study shows. But the foster kids still had lower grey matter volume than normal.
The findings do show “the potential for developmental ‘catch-up’ in white matter growth, even following extreme environmental deprivation,” the study authors write. And that’s cause for optimism: it shows that some of the damage due to early childhood neglect can be undone.
White matter is important because it’s responsible for much of the connectivity between different regions of the brain; it’s the brain’s “information superhighway,” as one of the researchers puts it. But growth of grey matter — the part of the brain thought to control sensory perception and muscle control — tends to happen during concentrated periods of childhood, not all throughout childhood like white matter growth does.
