Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e44067. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044067. Epub 2012 Sep 11.
Age-related variations in resting state connectivity of the human brain were examined from young adulthood through middle age. A voxel-based network measure, degree, was used to assess age-related differences in tissue connectivity throughout the brain. Increases in connectivity with age were found in paralimbic cortical and subcortical regions. Decreases in connectivity were found in cortical regions, including visual areas and the default mode network. These findings differ from those of recent developmental studies examining earlier growth trajectories, and are consistent with known changes in cognitive function and emotional processing during mature aging. The results support and extend previous findings that relied on a priori definitions of regions of interest for their analyses. This approach of applying a voxel-based measure to examine the functional connectivity of individual tissue elements over time, without the need for a priori region of interest definitions, provides an important new tool in brain science.
研究了从青年期到中年期人类大脑静息状态连接的年龄相关性变化。使用基于体素的网络度量——度，评估整个大脑中与年龄相关的组织连接差异。随着年龄的增长，连接性增加的区域位于边缘皮质和皮质下区域。连接性降低的区域位于包括视觉区域和默认模式网络在内的皮质区域。这些发现与最近研究早期生长轨迹的发展研究结果不同，与成熟衰老过程中认知功能和情绪处理的已知变化一致。该结果支持并扩展了之前的研究结果，这些研究结果依赖于对其进行分析的感兴趣区域的先验定义。这种应用基于体素的测量方法来检查个体组织元素随时间的功能连接的方法，而无需先验定义感兴趣区域，为脑科学提供了一个重要的新工具。
