Abstract
Measurement of hippocampal volume has proven useful to diagnose and track progression in several brain disorders, most notably in Alzheimer's disease (AD). For example, an objective evaluation of a patient's hippocampal volume status may provide important information that can assist diagnosis or risk stratification of AD. However, clinicians and researchers require access to age-related normative percentiles to reliably categorise a patient's hippocampal volume as being pathologically small. Here we analysed effects of age, sex, and hemisphere on the hippocampus and neighbouring temporal lobe volumes, in 19,793 generally healthy participants in the UK Biobank. A key finding of the current study is a significant acceleration in the rate of hippocampal volume loss in middle age, more pronounced in females than in males. In this report, we provide normative values for hippocampal and total grey matter volume as a function of age for reference in clinical and research settings. These normative values may be used in combination with our online, automated percentile estimation tool to provide a rapid, objective evaluation of an individual's hippocampal volume status. The data provide a large-scale normative database to facilitate easy age-adjusted determination of where an individual hippocampal and temporal lobe volume lies within the normal distribution.
Highlights
One of the most common brain imaging markers used in clinical research to study severity and progression of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is hippocampal volume on a structural MRI scan (Frisoni et al, 2010; Ahmed et al, 2014)
Increased atrophy of the hippocampus has been associated with neurofibrillary tangle and amyloid plaque deposition, which are considered to be the hallmark features of Alzheimer's disease (Kril et al, 2002; Schuff et al, 2009)
Using the rate of hippocampal atrophy, researchers have been able to distinguish between those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who progressed to AD, and those who did not (Frankó and Joly, 2013)
Summary
One of the most common brain imaging markers used in clinical research to study severity and progression of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is hippocampal volume on a structural MRI scan (Frisoni et al, 2010; Ahmed et al, 2014). Both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies have reported reduced volume of the hippocampus in patients with AD or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) compared to healthy controls (Henneman et al, 2009; Shi et al, 2009; Frankó and Joly, 2013). Hippocampal volume is considered to be a useful – and widely available – proxy to measure disease burden and progression in AD, including in clinical trials (Mielke et al, 2012; Frankó and Joly, 2013; Kishi et al, 2015; Choe et al, 2016)
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