The age-related posterior-anterior shift as revealed by voxelwise analysis of functional brain networks

Abstract

The posterior-anterior shift in aging (PASA) is a commonly observed phenomenon in functional neuroimaging studies of aging, characterized by age-related reductions in occipital activity alongside increases in frontal activity. In this work we have investigated the hypothesis as to whether the PASA is also manifested in functional brain network measures such as degree, clustering coefficient, path length and local efficiency. We have performed statistical analysis upon functional networks derived from a fMRI dataset containing data from healthy young, healthy aged, and aged individuals with very mild to mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Analysis of both task based and resting state functional network properties has indicated that the PASA can also be characterized in terms of modulation of functional network properties, and that the onset of AD appears to accentuate this modulation. We also explore the effect of spatial normalization upon the results of our analysis.