According to a new paper in the prestigous journal PNAS, High-field MRI reveals an acute impact on brain function in survivors of the magnitude 8.0 earthquake in China.
The earthquake, you'll remember, happened on 12th May last year in central China. Over 60,000 people died. The authors of this paper took 44 earthquake survivors, and 32 control volunteers who had not experienced the disaster.
The volunteers underwent a "resting state" fMRI scan; survivors were scanned between 13 and 25 days after the earthquake. Resting state fMRI is simply a scan conducted while lying in the scanner, not doing anything in particular. Previous work has shown that fMRI can be used to measure resting state neural activity in the form of low-frequency oscillations.
The authors found differences in the resting state low-frequency activity (ALFF) between the trauma survivors and the controls. In survivors, resting state activity was increased in several areas:
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