Biological Psychology, Department of Psychology, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Carl Von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 26129, Oldenburg, Germany.
Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all", Carl Von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 26129, Oldenburg, Germany.
Geroscience. 2023 Feb;45(1):277-291. doi: 10.1007/s11357-022-00630-3. Epub 2022 Jul 27.
Physical, mental, and cognitive resources are essential for healthy aging. Aging impacts on the structural integrity of various brain regions, including the hippocampus. Even though recent rodent studies hint towards a critical role of the hypothalamus, there is limited evidence on functional consequences of age-related changes of this region in humans. Given its central role in metabolic regulation and affective processing and its connections to the hippocampus, it is plausible that hypothalamic integrity and connectivity are associated with functional age-related decline. We used data of n = 369 participants (18-88 years) from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience repository to determine functional impacts of potential changes in hypothalamic microstructure across the lifespan. First, we identified age-related changes in microstructure as a function of physical, mental, and cognitive health and compared those findings to changes in hippocampal microstructure. Second, we investigated the relationship of hypothalamic microstructure and resting-state functional connectivity and related those changes to age as well as physical health. Our results showed that hypothalamic microstructure is not affected by depressive symptoms (mental health), cognitive performance (cognitive health), and comparatively stable across the lifespan, but affected by body mass (physical health). Furthermore, body mass changes connectivity to limbic regions including the hippocampus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens, suggesting functional alterations in the metabolic and reward systems. Our results demonstrate that hypothalamic structure and function are affected by body mass, focused on neural density and dispersion, but not inflammation. Still, observed effect sizes were small, encouraging detailed investigations of individual hypothalamic subunits.
身体、心理和认知资源对于健康衰老至关重要。衰老会影响到大脑各个区域的结构完整性，包括海马体。尽管最近的啮齿动物研究暗示了下丘脑的关键作用，但关于该区域与年龄相关变化在人类中的功能后果的证据有限。鉴于其在代谢调节和情感处理中的核心作用，以及与海马体的连接，下丘脑的完整性和连通性与功能相关的年龄相关下降是合理的。我们使用来自剑桥衰老和神经科学中心存储库的 n = 369 名参与者（18-88 岁）的数据，确定了整个生命周期中下丘脑微观结构的潜在变化对功能的影响。首先，我们确定了微观结构与身体、心理和认知健康相关的年龄变化，并将这些发现与海马体微观结构的变化进行了比较。其次，我们研究了下丘脑微观结构与静息状态功能连通性的关系，并将这些变化与年龄以及身体健康联系起来。我们的研究结果表明，下丘脑微观结构不受抑郁症状（心理健康）、认知表现（认知健康）的影响，且在整个生命周期中相对稳定，但受体重（身体健康）的影响。此外，体重变化与包括海马体、杏仁核和伏隔核在内的边缘区域的连通性有关，表明代谢和奖励系统的功能发生了改变。我们的研究结果表明，下丘脑的结构和功能受到体重的影响，重点是神经密度和分散度，而不是炎症。尽管如此，观察到的效应大小较小，鼓励对单个下丘脑亚单位进行详细研究。
