Mijalkov Mite, Veréb Dániel, Jamialahmadi Oveis, Canal-Garcia Anna, Gómez-Ruiz Emiliano, Vidal-Piñeiro Didac, Romeo Stefano, Volpe Giovanni, Pereira Joana B
Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, Goteborg University, Goteborg, Sweden.
Netw Neurosci. 2023 Jan 1;7(1):351-376. doi: 10.1162/netn_a_00286. eCollection 2023.
Aging is a major risk factor for cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders, with considerable societal and economic implications. Healthy aging is accompanied by changes in functional connectivity between and within resting-state functional networks, which have been associated with cognitive decline. However, there is no consensus on the impact of sex on these age-related functional trajectories. Here, we show that multilayer measures provide crucial information on the interaction between sex and age on network topology, allowing for better assessment of cognitive, structural, and cardiovascular risk factors that have been shown to differ between men and women, as well as providing additional insights into the genetic influences on changes in functional connectivity that occur during aging. In a large cross-sectional sample of 37,543 individuals from the UK Biobank cohort, we demonstrate that such multilayer measures that capture the relationship between positive and negative connections are more sensitive to sex-related changes in the whole-brain connectivity patterns and their topological architecture throughout aging, when compared to standard connectivity and topological measures. Our findings indicate that multilayer measures contain previously unknown information on the relationship between sex and age, which opens up new avenues for research into functional brain connectivity in aging.
衰老 是心血管疾病和神经退行性疾病的主要风险因素，具有重大的社会和经济影响。健康衰老伴随着静息态功能网络之间及内部功能连接性的变化，这些变化与认知衰退有关。然而，关于性别对这些与年龄相关的功能轨迹的影响尚无共识。在此，我们表明多层测量提供了关于性别与年龄在网络拓扑结构上相互作用的关键信息，有助于更好地评估已显示在男性和女性之间存在差异的认知、结构和心血管风险因素，同时还能为衰老过程中发生的功能连接变化的遗传影响提供更多见解。在来自英国生物银行队列的37543名个体的大型横断面样本中，我们证明，与标准连接性和拓扑测量相比，这种捕捉正连接和负连接之间关系的多层测量对衰老过程中全脑连接模式及其拓扑结构中与性别相关的变化更为敏感。我们的研究结果表明，多层测量包含了关于性别与年龄关系的此前未知的信息，这为衰老过程中功能性脑连接的研究开辟了新途径。
