Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Madrid, Spain.
Department of Psychology, Universidad de Cádiz, Cádiz, Spain.
Brain Struct Funct. 2022 Mar;227(2):451-462. doi: 10.1007/s00429-021-02305-9. Epub 2021 Jun 5.
Here, we address the hemispheric interdependency of subcortical structures in the aging human brain. In particular, we investigated whether subcortical volume variations can be explained by the adjacency of structures in the same hemisphere or are due to the interhemispheric development of mirror subcortical structures in the brain. Seven subcortical structures in each hemisphere were automatically segmented in a large sample of 3312 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of elderly individuals in their 70s and 80s. We performed Eigenvalue analysis, and found that anatomic volumes in the limbic system and basal ganglia show similar statistical dependency whether considered in the same hemisphere (intrahemispherically) or different hemispheres (interhemispherically). Our results indicate that anatomic bilaterality of subcortical volumes is preserved in the aging human brain, supporting the hypothesis that coupling between non-adjacent subcortical structures might act as a mechanism to compensate for the deleterious effects of aging.
在这里，我们研究了衰老人类大脑中皮质下结构的半球间相互依存性。具体来说，我们调查了皮质下体积的变化是否可以用同一半球结构的邻近性来解释，或者是否由于大脑中镜像皮质下结构的半球间发育所致。我们在 3312 名 70 多岁和 80 多岁老年人的磁共振成像（MRI）研究中，自动分割了每个半球的 7 个皮质下结构。我们进行了特征值分析，发现边缘系统和基底节的解剖体积无论在同一半球（半球内）还是不同半球（半球间）考虑，都具有相似的统计依赖性。我们的结果表明，衰老人类大脑中皮质下体积的解剖双侧性得以保留，这支持了这样一种假设，即非相邻皮质下结构之间的耦合可能作为一种机制来补偿衰老的有害影响。
