Trajectories of brain aging in middle-aged and older adults: Regional and individual differences

By Naftali Raz, Paolo Ghisletta, Karen M. Rodrigue, Kristen M. Kennedy, Ulman E. R. Lindenberger. NeuroImage, 2010

603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The human brain changes with age. However, the rate and the trajectories of change vary among the brain regions and among individuals, and the reasons for these differences are unclear. In a sample of healthy middle-aged and older adults, we examined mean volume change and individual differences in the rate of change in 12 regional brain volumes over approximately 30 months. In addition to the baseline assessment, there were two follow-ups, 15 months apart. We observed significant average shrinkage of the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, orbital–frontal cortex, and cerebellum in each of the intervals. Shrinkage of the hippocampus accelerated with time, whereas shrinkage of the caudate nucleus, prefrontal subcortical white matter, and corpus callosum emerged only at the second follow-up. Throughout both assessment intervals, the mean volumes of the lateral prefrontal and primary visual cortices, putamen, and pons did not change. Significant individual differences in shrinkage rates were observed in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum, and all the white matter regions throughout the study, whereas additional regions (medial–temporal structures, the insula, and the basal ganglia) showed significant individual variation in change during the second follow-up. No individual variability was noted in the change of orbital frontal and visual cortices. In two white matter regions, we were able to identify factors associated with individual differences in brain shrinkage. In corpus callosum, shrinkage rate was greater in persons with hypertension, and in the pons, women and carriers of the ApoEε4 allele exhibited declines not noted in the whole sample.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c341087f2a80595ebcad10e2601332465d6b146

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Citations in the corpus

A pathophysiological framework of hippocampal dysfunction in ageing and disease (2011, background): “Longitudinal studies have shown that although entorhinal cortex shrinkage can be observed at very old ages, the rest of the hippocampus (not the entorhinal cortex) showed a reliable age-related decline across age groups, tracking the time course of age-related memory declin”
What is normal in normal aging? Effects of Aging, Amyloid and Alzheimer’s Disease on the Cerebral Cortex and the Hippocampus (2014, background): “Evidence is accumulating, however, that in healthy older adults, temporal areas undergo reductions over time of comparable magnitude to the frontal changes (Driscoll et al., 2009; Fjell et al., 2009a; Raz et al., 2010; Pfefferbaum et al., 2013).”
Evolution of hippocampal shapes across the human lifespan (2013, background): “, 2001] or older adults (age above 45 years) [Chen et al., 2010; Hackert et al., 2002; Jack et al., 1997; Raz et al., 2010] suggested a linear relationship between age and hippocampal volumes.”
Age Differences in Hippocampal Subfield Volumes from Childhood to Late Adulthood (2015, background): “Studies of healthy adults reveal consistent, monotonic decline in total hippocampal volume that begins in early adulthood and possibly accelerates toward the seventh or eighth decades (Raz et al., 2005, 2010).”
Predicting Age Using Neuroimaging: Innovative Brain Ageing Biomarkers. (2017, positive): “Second, age-related changes to the brain are subtle, nonlinear, and spatially distributed and vary between individuals [4,6,52].”
A Review of the Effects of Physical Activity and Exercise on Cognitive and Brain Functions in Older Adults (2013, background): “[13] followed participants over 30 months and observed that the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex, the orbital-frontal cortex, and the cerebellum showed volumetric changes after only 15 months, while other brain structures showed shrinkage after 30 months, including the caudate nucleus, the prefron”