Your brain expands and shrinks over time — these charts show how

Amazing stuff!

Once more typical overblown concerns are expressed in accordance with prevailing ideology:

"Even so, the authors caution that their database isn’t completely inclusive — they struggled to gather brain scans from all regions of the globe. ...
Despite the size of the data set, [scientists] acknowledge that their study suffers from a problem endemic to neuroimaging studies — a remarkable lack of diversity. ..."

Scientists are human, all too human!

"... [scientists have] amassed more than 120,000 brain scans — the largest collection of its kind — to create the first comprehensive growth charts for brain development. The charts show visually how human brains expand quickly early in life and then shrink slowly with age. ...
Because brain structure varies significantly from person to person, the researchers had to aggregate a huge number of scans to create an authoritative set of growth charts with statistical significance. ..."

From the abstract:

"Over the past few decades, neuroimaging has become a ubiquitous tool in basic research and clinical studies of the human brain. However, no reference standards currently exist to quantify individual differences in neuroimaging metrics over time, in contrast to growth charts for anthropometric traits such as height and weight. Here we assemble an interactive open resource to benchmark brain morphology derived from any current or future sample of MRI data (http://www.brainchart.io/). With the goal of basing these reference charts on the largest and most inclusive dataset available, acknowledging limitations due to known biases of MRI studies relative to the diversity of the global population, we aggregated 123,984 MRI scans, across more than 100 primary studies, from 101,457 human participants between 115 days post-conception to 100 years of age. MRI metrics were quantified by centile scores, relative to non-linear trajectories of brain structural changes, and rates of change, over the lifespan. Brain charts identified previously unreported neurodevelopmental milestones, showed high stability of individuals across longitudinal assessments, and demonstrated robustness to technical and methodological differences between primary studies. Centile scores showed increased heritability compared with non-centiled MRI phenotypes, and provided a standardized measure of atypical brain structure that revealed patterns of neuroanatomical variation across neurological and psychiatric disorders. In summary, brain charts are an essential step towards robust quantification of individual variation benchmarked to normative trajectories in multiple, commonly used neuroimaging phenotypes."

Your brain expands and shrinks over time — these charts show how Based on more than 120,000 brain scans, the charts are still preliminary. But researchers hope they could one day be used as a routine clinical tool by physicians.

Brain charts for the human lifespan (open access)