Abstract
PURPOSE: Exercise is a promising strategy to help maintain brain function during aging. Determining the efficacy of exercise interventions requires reliable clinical outcome measures. In addition to measurement error and biological variability, long-term test-retest values can also be influenced by biasing factors - namely aging and practice effects. The purpose of this study was to determine the 12-week test-retest reliability of cognitive and neuroimaging measures in older adults. METHODS: Twenty healthy older adults (14 females, 60-80 years of age) participated in two sessions of cognitive testing and multimodal 3T MRI scanning (Siemens MAGNETOM Prisma). All tests were performed by a single rater separated by a 12-week control period. The NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery (NIHTB-CB) was used to assess fluid and crystallized cognitive function. T-2 FLAIR images were processed for white matter lesion volume (WMLV, ml) using the Lesion Segmentation Toolbox. T-1 MPRAGE images were processed for gray matter volume (GMV, mm3) in 3 subcortical regions using FreeSurfer cortical segmentation. Statistical analyses were performed in SPSS (v.25) including mean percent difference, effect size, paired t-test, and two-way mixed intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) with absolute agreement. RESULTS: Results are presented in Table 1. There were no significant t-test values indicating good agreement between the two sessions. As expected, reliability was excellent in crystallized cognition and moderate to good in fluid cognition. Last, all brain segmentations showed good to excellent reliability. CONCLUSIONS: The long-term (12-weeks) test-retest reliability of standard cognitive and neuroimaging measures were within an acceptable tolerance for use in future intervention studies. Although fluid cognition has the greatest implications for and neurobiological link to cognitive aging, investigators should consider the greater variability in these measures.
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