Abstract
Introduction: Age-related brain changes are one of the most important world health problems due to the rising lifespan and size of the elderly populations. The aim of the study was to assess the effect of ageing in women on coordinated brain activity between eight resting-state networks.Material and Methods: The study group comprised 60 healthy female volunteers who were divided into two age groups: younger women (aged 20–30 n = 30) and older women (aged 55–80 n = 30). Resting-state data were collected during a 15 min scan in the eyes-closed condition using a 3T MR scanner. Data were preprocessed and analysed using the CONN toolbox version 19.c. The large-scale network analysis included a priori selected regions of interest of the default mode, the sensorimotor, the visual, the salience, the dorsal attention, the fronto-parietal, the language, and the cerebellar network.Results: Within the visual, the default mode, the salience, and the sensorimotor network, the intra-network resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) was significantly higher with increasing age. There was also a significant increase in the inter-network RSFC in older females compared to young females found in the following networks: sensorimotor lateral and salience, salience and language, salience and fronto-parietal, cerebellar anterior and default mode, cerebellar posterior and default mode, visual and sensorimotor lateral, visual and sensorimotor, visual lateral and default mode, language and cerebellar anterior, language and cerebellar posterior, fronto-parietal and cerebellar anterior, dorsal attention and sensorimotor, dorsal attention and default mode, sensorimotor superior, and salience. Compared to young females, elderly women presented bilaterally significantly lower inter-network RSFC of the salience supramarginal gyrus and cerebellar posterior, sensorimotor lateral, and cerebellar anterior network, and sensorimotor lateral and cerebellar posterior as well as sensorimotor superior and cerebellar posterior network.Conclusion: Increased RSFC between some brain networks including the visual, the default mode, the salience, the sensorimotor, the language, the fronto-parietal, the dorsal attention, and the cerebellar networks in elderly females may function as a compensation mechanism during the ageing process of the brain. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to report the importance of increase of cerebellar networks RSFC during healthy female ageing.
Highlights
Age-related brain changes are one of the most important world health problems due to the rising lifespan and size of the elderly populations
The neurological examination and the results of the MiniMental State Examination (MMSE) and clock-drawing test (CDT) tests were within normal limits in all subjects (Table 1)
The ROI–ROI FC analysis using the Spatial pairwise clustering (SPC) method revealed a significant increase in the intra- and inter-network brain FC within 11 clusters (Table 2) and a significant decrease in the internetwork brain FC in two clusters (Table 3) in group 2 in comparison to group 1
Summary
Age-related brain changes are one of the most important world health problems due to the rising lifespan and size of the elderly populations. The aim of the study was to assess the effect of ageing in women on coordinated brain activity between eight resting-state networks. Ageing is one of the most important problems of contemporary society due to the increasing lifespan and size of elderly populations. There are known differences in the ageing process between women and men. Sex differences influence brain morphology and physiology during both development and ageing. Neuroanatomical sex differences in the brain are region-specific [2, 3]. Apart from the anatomical dissimilarities, recently there have been reports on differences associated with sex in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) [6, 7]
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