Neurobiology of Aging

Aging MetaAnalysis of brain Glutamate measures at 3T This file contains the final data used in "A Quantitative Meta-Analysis of Brain Glutamate Metabolites in Aging" by David R. Roalf, Ph.D., Valerie J. Sydnor, B.A., Madison Woods, David A. Wolk, M.D., J. Cobb Scott, Ph.D., Ravinder Reddy, Ph.D. & Paul J. Moberg, Ph.D as re-submitted to Neurobiology of Aging on June 2, 2020.

Raw data for the paper Erbaba Et al., submitted to Neurobiology of Aging

dataset

imaging and cognitive data from 86 subjects: ws2-based tau measure (tau), global amyloid PET SUVR (abeta), regional amyloid PET SUVR in temporal lobe (temp), cingulate cortex, parietal lobe (par), frontal lobe(front) , tau PET SUVRs (ibraak1, ibraak34, ibraak56), standard objective cognitive performance (mmse, adas, adef, admem), and subjective cognitive scores (emem,elan, eviso, eplan, eorg, ediv)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder characterized by specific patterns ofgray and white matter damage and cognitive/behavioral manifestations. The cerebellum has also beenimplicated in the pathophysiology of AD. Because the cerebellum is known to have strong functionalconnectivity (FC) with associative cerebral cortex regions, it is possible to hypothesize that it is incor-porated into intrinsic FC networks relevant to cognitive manifestation of AD. In the present study, thecerebellar dentate nucleus, the largest cerebellar nucleus and the major output channel to the cerebralcortex, was chosen as the region of interest to test potential cerebellocerebral FC alterations and cor-relations with patients' memory impairment in a group of patients with AD. Compared to controls,patients with AD showed an increase in FC between the dentate nucleus and regions of the lateraltemporal lobe. This study demonstrates that lower memory performances in AD may be related toaltered FC within specific cerebellocortical functional modules, thus suggesting the cerebellar contri-bution to AD pathophysiology and typical memory dysfunctions.

We know how age affects the brain during lab-based tasks, but what about situations truer to everyday life, such as watching movies? We measured fMRI activity while participants (N=577) from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (www.cam-can.com) watched a movie. Watching the same movie induces significant inter-subject synchronization of brain activity across participants. These cross-subject correlations suggest that viewers are processing incoming information in a similar (or shared) way. We show that with advancing age, synchrony is preserved in some areas, including the language network, but decreased in others, including the medial prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe and fronto-parietal network. Synchrony declines were driven by more idiosyncratic responding in older adults and were associated with regionally-distinct temporal profiles and functional connectivity patterns, as well as declines in white matter integrity. These findings suggest that areas involved in language processing remain intact with age, while regions involved in attentional control and memory may show age-related declines, even in situations similar to daily life.