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Childhood maltreatment can continue to have an impact long into adulthood because of how it effects an individual’s risk of poor physical health and traumatic experiences many years later, a new study has found.

An international team of researchers has created a series of brain charts spanning our entire lifespan – from a 15 week old fetus to 100 year old adult – that show how our brains expand rapidly in early life and slowly shrink as we age. 

New brain networks come ‘online’ during adolescence, allowing teenagers to develop more complex adult social skills, but potentially putting them at increased risk of mental illness, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Deeper understanding of the wiring and rewiring of the adolescent brain is helping scientists pinpoint why young people are especially vulnerable to mental health problems – and why some are resilient.

A new and relatively simple technique for mapping the wiring of the brain has shown a correlation between how well connected an individual’s brain regions are and their intelligence, say researchers at the �������������Ī.

The next generation of imaging technology, newly installed at the �������������Ī, will give researchers an unprecedented view of the human body – in particular of the myriad connections within our brains and of tumours as they grow and respond to treatment – and could pave the way for development of treatments personalised for individual patients.

Scientists have mapped the structural changes that occur in teenagers’ brains as they develop, showing how these changes may help explain why the first signs of mental health problems often arise during late adolescence.

Ed Bullmore (Department of Psychiatry) and Nicolas Crossley (King's College London) discuss their work trying to find out how sense of self is expressed in the brain.

Adolescence is a dangerous time for the onset of mental health problems. Advances in brain imaging are helping to picture how neural changes in these crucial years can lead to chronic debilitating mental illness.  

Today, we commence a month-long focus on neuroscience. To begin, Ed Bullmore, Bill Harris and Dervila Glynn describe how this area of research is transforming our understanding of the healthy brain and promising new treatments for devastating disorders that affect millions of people.