What is normal in normal aging? Effects of Aging, Amyloid and Alzheimer’s Disease on the Cerebral Cortex and the Hippocampus
By Anders M. Fjell, Linda K. McEvoy, Dominic Holland, A. M. Dale, Kristine B. Walhovd. Progress in neurobiology, 2014
752 citations recorded by the source corpus.
What can be expected in normal aging, and where does normal aging stop and pathological neurodegeneration begin? With the slow progression of age-related dementias such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), it is difficult to distinguish age-related changes from effects of undetected disease. We review recent research on changes of the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus in aging and the borders between normal aging and AD. We argue that prominent cortical reductions are evident in fronto-temporal regions in elderly even with low probability of AD, including regions overlapping the default mode network. Importantly, these regions show high levels of amyloid deposition in AD, and are both structurally and functionally vulnerable early in the disease. This normalcy-pathology homology is critical to understand, since aging itself is the major risk factor for sporadic AD. Thus, rather than necessarily reflecting early signs of disease, these changes may be part of normal aging, and may inform on why the aging brain is so much more susceptible to AD than is the younger brain. We suggest that regions characterized by a high degree of life-long plasticity are vulnerable to detrimental effects of normal aging, and that this age-vulnerability renders them more susceptible to additional, pathological AD-related changes. We conclude that it will be difficult to understand AD without understanding why it preferably affects older brains, and that we need a model that accounts for age-related changes in AD-vulnerable regions independently of AD-pathology.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Physiology, Psychiatry and Mental health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2207dda3aafefc3268df3c84f6230dc27e3f2f82
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Citations in the corpus
- Effects of aging on functional and structural brain connectivity☆ (2017, background): “Age-related differences in cognitive performance have been linked to differences in various magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) derived brain measures, such as regional grey matter volume and task-induced activation (Fjell et al., 2014; Kennedy and Raz, 2015).”
- Long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and the brain: a review of the independent and shared effects of EPA, DPA and DHA (2015, background): “…is more prone to the development of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and with the slow developing preclinical phases of these diseases it may be difficult to distinguish what are age-related changes and what are effects of the undetected disease (Fjell et al., 2014).”