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Effects of aging on brain volumes in healthy individuals across adulthood

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Abstract

In this retrospective study, we analyzed the effects of age on brain volumes in healthy brains across adulthood. We investigated the correlations between brain volumes and age in the brains of 563 healthy individuals (age range: 20–86, 55% female) whose MRI scans and related information were drawn from the IXI database (brain-development.org/ixi-dataset/). We conducted a regression analysis to assess the effect of age on whole-brain volumes as well as selected regional volumetric measures. The whole-brain analysis revealed a negative linear relationship between gray matter (GM) and age as well as nonlinear patterns of the relationship between age and the white matter (WM), cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and the GM/WM ratio across adulthood. The regional volumetric analysis showed linear and non-linear age-related regional volumetric changes with aging. Our present findings contribute to the understanding of how structures in the human brain change over the adult years and will help address the pathological age-related neural changes in age-related neural disorders such as Parkinson disease and Alzheimer disease.

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Availability of data and materials

The dataset analyzed during this current study are available at http://brain-development.org/ixi-dataset/.

Abbreviations

GM:

gray matter

WM:

white matter

CSF:

cerebrospinal fluid

nGM:

normalize GM

nWM:

normalize WM

nCSF:

normalize CSF

MRI:

magnetic resonance imaging

VBM:

voxel-based morphometry

TIV:

total intracranial volume

ICV:

intracranial volume

CAT:

Computational Anatomy Toolbox

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Funding

This work was partly carried out under the Brain Mapping by Integrated Neurotechnologies for Disease Studies (Brain/MINDS) project (grant number 16dm0207017h0003), funded by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) and Intramural Research Grant (27-8) for Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders of the NCNP.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Integrative Brain Imaging Center, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry 4-1-1, Kodaira, Tokyo, 187-8551, Japan

    Iman Beheshti, Norihide Maikusa & Hiroshi Matsuda

Authors
  1. Iman Beheshti
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  2. Norihide Maikusa
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  3. Hiroshi Matsuda
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Contributions

IB designed the research, performed the statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript. NM performed the volumetric segmentation. HM participated in the design of the study and supervised the statistical analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Iman Beheshti.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Ethics approval

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Tokyo, Japan.

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Beheshti, I., Maikusa, N. & Matsuda, H. Effects of aging on brain volumes in healthy individuals across adulthood. Neurol Sci 40, 1191–1198 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-019-03817-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-019-03817-3

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