Brain metabolism and blood flow during aging

Abstract

Recent studies of cerebral metabolism have suggested that although cerebral blood flow is reduced during rest in the healthy aged brain, there is little or no decline in resting glucose consumption. Intercorrelations between resting regional cerebral rates for glucose (rCMRglc), as determined by positron emission tomography using [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose, were shown to provide a measure of the functional associativity of brain regions. Partial correlation coefficients, controlling for whole brain glucose metabolism, were used in the analysis. Dividing the brain into 59 regions, we found, for 40 healthy males (21-83 years in age) in a state of reduced sensory input, that the strongest correlations generally were between bilaterally symmetric brain regions, and that there were many statistically significant correlations (P less than 0.01) among frontal and parietal lobe regions and also among temporal and occipital lobe areas, but few significant correlations between these two domains. The correlation analysis then was applied to two groups (15 healthy males each) of young (20-32 years old) and elderly (64-83 years old) subjects in the same resting state. Compared with the young group, we found that the elderly subjects have fewer statistically significant (P less than 0.01) correlations, with the most noteworthy reductions being between parietal and frontal lobe regions, and among parietal lobe areas. These findings indicated that cerebral functional interactions were reduced in the healthy elderly. The same analysis, applied to 21 mainly mildly-to-moderately impaired presumed Alzheimer subjects (and 21 age-matched controls), revealed fewer significant correlations between homologous brain regions which correspond to metabolic asymmetries linked to neuropsychological deficiencies.