Author : Roni Setton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (131 download)
Book Synopsis New Perspectives on the Aging Brain by : Roni Setton
Download or read book New Perspectives on the Aging Brain written by Roni Setton and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "According to popular literature, late life development progresses along a linear trajectory of monotonic age-related decline. Emerging research on brain and cognitive aging is now challenging this view. Healthy aging comprises a complex set of functional, structural, and cognitive changes marked by gains and losses. These complex patterns suggest that human development continues as an active process into later life, yet how they intersect remains poorly understood. In three cross-sectional studies, deep behavioral phenotyping and novel neuroimaging techniques were used to examine age differences in brain function, structure, and their relationships to cognition at both the whole-brain and smaller systems levels. The overarching goal was to characterize these interactions against a backdrop of late life development that involves both adaptive and maladaptive change. Study 1 adopted a whole-brain, data-driven approach to examine whether functional network dedifferentiation, a defining feature of functional brain aging, is a global property of brain aging or a network-level phenomenon, and how this could inform cognitive differences. Multi-echo resting state functional images and cognitive assessments were collected from 181 younger and 120 older healthy adults. We found evidence for both global and network-specific dedifferentiation in older versus younger adults, with direct implications for aging cognition. Through the lens of autobiographical memory (AM), studies 2 and 3 involved more targeted assessments of age differences to brain structure and function in association with cognition (158 younger, 105 older adults). Study 2 tested for differences in grey matter volume of regions implicated in AM--anterior/posterior hippocampus (AHIPP/PHIPP) and temporal poles (TP)--and whether volume differences were associated with AM performance in each cohort. Older adults had smaller PHIPP volumes compared to younger adults, but episodic AM was positively related to AHIPP and TP volumes in older adults. Study 3 examined age group differences in resting-state functional connectivity of a local circuit implicated in AM and its association to AM. Older adults' connectivity profile was marked by TP integration with regions across the default network, and were associated with smaller PHIPP volumes. An age-invariant pattern dissociated connectivity related to episodic and semantic AM, suggesting a preservation of functional circuits related to AM. Younger adults also demonstrated a unique pattern of connectivity related to overall recollection. These results provided strong evidence that variance in a local functional circuit is sensitive to systematic variation in recollection that coincides with shifts in older age. These studies advance our understanding of the complex contours of brain aging, underscoring that structural and functional changes may index both adaptive and maladaptive processes associated with cognition in older adulthood. Taken together, the findings from these studies offer initial support for an adaptive neuroplasticity account of neurocognitive aging, and bear import on outlooks for real-world functioning in late life"--