Age-related gray and white matter changes in normal adult brains

Abstract

Normal aging is associated with both structural changes in many brain regions and functional declines in several cognitive domains with advancing age. Advanced neuroimaging techniques enable explorative analyses of structural alterations that can be used as assessments of such age-related changes. Here we used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate regional and global brain volume differences among four groups of healthy adults from the IXI Dataset: older females (OF, mean age 68.35 yrs; n=69), older males (OM, 68.43 yrs; n=66), young females (YF, 27.09 yrs; n=71), and young males (YM, 27.91 yrs; n=71), using 3D T1-weighted MRI data. At the global level, we investigated the influence of age and gender on brain volumes using a two-way analysis of variance. With respect to gender, we used the Pearson correlation to investigate global brain volume alterations due to age in the older and young groups. At the regional level, we used a flexible factorial statistical test to compare the means of gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) volume alterations among the four groups. We observed different patterns in both the global and regional GM and WM alterations in the young and older groups with respect to gender. At the global level, we observed significant influences of age and gender on global brain volumes. At the regional level, the older subjects showed a widespread reduction in GM volume in regions of the frontal, insular, and cingulate cortices compared to the young subjects in both genders. Compared to the young subjects, the older subjects showed a widespread WM decline prominently in the thalamic radiations, in addition to increased WM in pericentral and occipital areas. Knowledge of these observed brain volume differences and changes may contribute to the elucidation of mechanisms underlying aging as well as age-related brain atrophy and disease.