Associations of reading skills and properties of cerebral white matter pathways in 8-year-old children born preterm

ABSTRACTAIMChildren born preterm (PT) experience perinatal white matter injury and later reading deficits at school age. We used two complementary neuroimaging modalities to determine if reading skills would be associated with contemporaneous white matter properties in school-aged PT children.METHODIn 8-year-old PT children (N=29), we measured diffusivity (fractional anisotropy, FA), from diffusion MRI, and myelin content (relaxation rate, R1) from quantitative relaxometry. We assessed reading (Gray’s Oral Reading Test, Fifth Edition) in each child. Whole-brain deterministic tractography coupled with automatic segmentation and quantification were applied to extract FA and R1 along four tracts and assess their statistical association with reading scores.RESULTSReading-FA correlations were not significant along the four analyzed tracts. Reading-R1 correlations were significantly positive in portions of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus, right uncinate fasciculus, and left inferior longitudinal fasciculus. FA positively correlated with R1 in limited areas of reading-R1 associations, but did not contribute to the variance in reading scores.INTERPRETATIONCombining complementary neuroimaging approaches identified relations between reading and white matter properties not found using a single MRI measure. Associations of reading skills and white matter properties may vary across white matter tracts and metrics in PT children.What this paper adds▪Preterm children’s reading was associated with white matter myelin content.▪Preterm children’s reading was not associated with white matter diffusivity.