The researchers found plentiful evidence of neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus during prenatal brain development and in newborns, observing an average of 1,618 young neurons per square millimeter of brain tissue at the time of birth. But the number of newborn cells sharply declined in samples obtained during early infancy: dentate gyrus samples from year-old infants contained fivefold fewer new neurons than was seen in samples from newborn infants. The decline continued into childhood, with the number of new neurons declining by 23-fold between one and seven years of age, followed by a further fivefold decrease by 13 years, at which point neurons also appeared more mature than those seen in samples from younger brains. The authors observed only about 2.4 new cells per square millimeter of DG tissue in early adolescence, and found no evidence of newborn neurons in any of the 17 adult post-mortem DG samples or in surgically extracted tissue samples from 12 adult patients with epilepsy. - www.sciencedaily.com