The first reference charts for the human brain have been completed

IF A DOCTOR wants to know how well a child is growing, she can turn to clinically validated charts that lay out precisely how that child compares to the norm for their age and sex. Not only can the doctor look up, say, how many centimetres shorter or taller the child is than the average for their age, but exactly what height percentile they fall into. Medical diagnoses can then be made based on an absolute comparison with the statistical norm.Reference charts are an important tool in modern primary medicine, covering many aspects of a person’s healthy development. There is, however, a big gap in their coverage: the human brain. Richard Bethlehem and Simon White from the University of Cambridge and Jakob Seidlitz from the University of Pennsylvania want to fix that. Writing in , the neuroscientists describe the most comprehensive effort yet to create a standard against which someone’s brain development can be measured through their lifetime.