Screen time, Physical Brain Changes, and Gender

[Dr. Marc Potenza] So in our- some of our initial analyses, hot off the presses as it were, we identified three joint components linking baseline screen media activity at age 9 to 10 to different scores from ages 9 to 10 to 11 to 12 years in cortical thickness surface area and subcortical gray matter volume. And these covariation patterns involving these cortical largely subcortical brain regions were highly reproducible by Pearson’s correlations ranging from 0.82 to .91. We didn’t find strong relationships with cognitive or externalizing or internalizing scores, but we did find a gender-related difference in one component. And this component included the brainstem largely subcortical brain regions including the hippocampus and thalamus, as well as the frontal pole and diencephalon. And what we saw was that there was this difference between boys and girls.The girls are shown in red, the boys in black. And we can see that this separation, particularly for the high total screen time. And when we looked at the types of screen media activity, this appears to be linked to gaming behaviors among the boys.