Brain Weight of Danish Children

Abstract

Medico-legal data are presented on 995 child deaths, 361 girls and 634 boys aged 0–18 years, whose brains were weighed at the time of autopsy using a standardized weighing technique (the brains were weighed before fixation, immediately after entire removal; the medulla oblongata was divided in the foramen magnum). From the results it appears that the brain weights are greater than those reported in a previously published series. This may be ascribed to a higher degree of oedema and a shorter duration of illness, or an absence of illness; another explanation may be related to a difference in origin. It should be remembered that post-mortem brain weights exceed the ante-mortem weights by up to 9%. The greater part of brain growth is completed by the end of the 2nd year of life, and thereafter the brain weight in girls is on the average a little lower than that in boys. No significant differences in brain weights are found in the various groups of causes of death; the brain weights in the group of sudden, unexpected infant deaths especially do not deviate from those in the other groups.

Ontogeny of facial dimorphism and patterns of individual development within one human population

“…Sexual dimorphism in size of the anterior part of the neurocranium can be detected at the earliest ages available for this study, and stays practically constant over the whole period of investigation. This result corresponds with data on sexual dimorphism in the brain size of infants (Dekaban and Sadowsky, 1978;Pakkenberg and Voigt, 1964;Voigt and Pakkenberg, 1983) and in pre-and early postnatal head circumference (Joffe et al, 2004). The constant degree of size difference, however, is a new finding.…”

Multimodal neuroimaging of male and female brain structure in health and disease across the life span

“…One remarkable claim is that, on average, the volume of the male brain before the age of 6 is larger than that of the average adult female (Giedd et al, 2015). A similar 10% sex difference in mean postmortem brain weight was reported long before imaging studies were common (Voigt and Pakkenberg, 1983).…”

Why are human newborns so fat? Relationship between fatness and brain size at birth [retracted article]

“…For example, Loesch et al (1999) found that birthweight and birth BMI are significantly related to head circumference at school age. It has been also ascertained that the largest increases in brain weight in both sexes seems to occur during the first 2 (Voigt and Pakkenberg, 1983) or 3 years of life, when the value quadruples over the one at birth, while during the next 15 years the brain weight quintuples over the one at birth (Dekaban, 1978). Studies by Reiss et al (1996), using MRI techniques, reveal also that both boys and girls show little change in the total cerebral volume after the age of 5 years.…”