Seventy-six healthy adults underwent magnetic resonance imaging (1.5 T) to investigate the effects of age on regional cerebral volumes and on the frequency and severity of cortical atrophy, lateral ventricular enlargement, and subcortical hyperintensity. Increasing age was associated with (1) decreasing volumes of the cerebral hemispheres (0.23% per year), the frontal lobes (0.55% per year), the temporal lobes (0.28% per year), and the amygdala-hippocampal complex (0.30% per year); (2) increasing volumes of the third ventricle (2.8% per year) and the lateral ventricles (3.2% per year); and (3) increasing odds of cortical atrophy (8.9% per year), lateral ventricular enlargement (7.7% per year), and subcortical hyperintensity in the deep white matter (6.3% per year) and the pons (8.1% per year). Many elderly subjects did not exhibit cortical atrophy or lateral ventricular enlargement, however, indicating that such changes are not inevitable consequences of advancing age. These data should provide a useful clinical context within which to interpret changes in regional brain size associated with "abnormal" aging.

1. As ATP has a higher affinity for Mg2+ than ADP, the cytosolic magnesium concentration rises upon ATP hydrolysis. We have therefore used the Mg2+-sensitive fluorescent indicator Magnesium Green (MgG)

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High-field magnetic resonance (MR) images were used to study posterior fossa morphology in 27 patients with major depression and 36 normal control subjects. Depressed patients demonstrated smaller brain stem and cerebellar vermis than controls. These differences were highly significant for the anterior cerebellar vermis and medulla. There was also a striking age-related decline in midbrain size in depressed patients as well as in controls. Our results are consistent with several lines of evidence implicating a role for the cerebellar vermis in affective disorders and, in addition, provide the first MR documentation of the differential effects of aging on posterior fossa morphology in normal subjects compared with patients with major depression.

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