Changes in structural and functional connectivity among resting-state networks across the human lifespan

By Richard F. Betzel, Lisa Byrge, Ye He, Joaquín Goñi, Xi-Nian Zuo, Olaf Sporns. NeuroImage, 2014

808 citations recorded by the source corpus.

At rest, the brain's sensorimotor and higher cognitive systems engage in organized patterns of correlated activity forming resting-state networks. An important empirical question is how functional connectivity and structural connectivity within and between resting-state networks change with age. In this study we use network modeling techniques to identify significant changes in network organization across the human lifespan. The results of this study demonstrate that whole-brain functional and structural connectivity both exhibit reorganization with age. On average, functional connections within resting-state networks weaken in magnitude while connections between resting-state networks tend to increase. These changes can be localized to a small subset of functional connections that exhibit systematic changes across the lifespan. Collectively, changes in functional connectivity are also manifest at a system-wide level, as components of the control, default mode, saliency/ventral attention, dorsal attention, and visual networks become less functionally cohesive, as evidenced by decreased component modularity. Paralleling this functional reorganization is a decrease in the density and weight of anatomical white-matter connections. Hub regions are particularly affected by these changes, and the capacity of those regions to communicate with other regions exhibits a lifelong pattern of decline. Finally, the relationship between functional connectivity and structural connectivity also appears to change with age; functional connectivity along multi-step structural paths tends to be stronger in older subjects than in younger subjects. Overall, our analysis points to age-related changes in inter-regional communication unfolding within and between resting-state networks.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec1df2ae7a2754c2c763d6817fc5358ceb71bd26

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Development of large-scale functional networks from birth to adulthood: a guide to neuroimaging literature (2017, background): “Another study found that age-related changes in FC disproportionately impacts polysynaptic connections (Betzel et al., 2014), although this study was performed across the lifespan and may reflect an effect of aging.”
Modular Brain Networks (2015, background): “Concurrently, and using a different definition of communities (Yeo et al. 2011), Betzel et al. (2014) reported decreased modularity with age in modules associated with cognitive control and attention.”
Application of Graph Theory for Identifying Connectivity Patterns in Human Brain Networks: A Systematic Review (2019, neutral): “…hub areas mainly within the default mode, attentional, sensorimotor, and visual regions via rs-fMRI (Meunier et al., 2009; Fransson et al., 2011; Hwang et al., 2013; Wu et al., 2013; Betzel et al., 2014; Cao et al., 2014b; Grayson and Fair, 2017; Finotelli et al., 2018; Gozdas et al., 2018).”
Generative models of the human connectome (2015, neutral): “A more detailed description of the processing pipeline was included in other reports (Betzel et al., 2014; Cao et al., 2014; Yang et al., 2014).”
Effects of aging on functional and structural brain connectivity☆ (2017, background): “Several studies that assessed age-related structural and functional connectivity differences in the same dataset found that functional and structural connectivity are closely aligned and that they are both affected by age (Betzel et al., 2014; Fjell et al., 2016b; Zimmermann et al., 2016).”
Multi-scale brain networks (2016, neutral): “, 2014) to that of the entire lifespan (Zuo et al., 2010; Betzel et al., 2014; Gu et al., 2015b), to evolutionary changes across different species (van den Heuvel et al.”