The independent influences of age and education on functional brain networks and cognition in healthy older adults

Abstract

Healthy aging is accompanied by a constellation of changes in cognitive processes and alterations in functional brain networks. The relationships between brain networks and cognition during aging in later life are moderated by demographic and environmental factors, such as prior education, in a poorly understood manner. Using multivariate analyses, we identified three latent patterns (or modes) linking resting-state functional connectivity to demographic and cognitive measures in 101 cognitively normal elders. The first mode (P = 0.00043) captures an opposing association between age and core cognitive processes such as attention and processing speed on functional connectivity patterns. The functional subnetwork expressed by this mode links bilateral sensorimotor and visual regions through key areas such as the parietal operculum. A strong, independent association between years of education and functional connectivity loads onto a second mode (P = 0.012), characterized by the involvement of key hub regions. A third mode (P = 0.041) captures weak, residual brain-behavior relations. Our findings suggest that circuits supporting lower level cognitive processes are most sensitive to the influence of age in healthy older adults. Education, and to a lesser extent, executive functions, load independently onto functional networks-suggesting that the moderating effect of education acts upon networks distinct from those vulnerable with aging. This has important implications in understanding the contribution of education to cognitive reserve during healthy aging. Hum Brain Mapp 38:5094-5114, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Cognitive Profiles and Hub Vulnerability in Parkinson's Disease

“…Several studies have utilized CCA to study inter-correlations between behavioral data, cognition, imaging findings, and daily activity in both healthy subjects and disease populations ( 18 , 23 – 27 ), indicating that CCA is a useful tool to study relations between two sets of data. In PD, a CCA approach found that working memory, attention, planning, and problem solving were inter-correlated with visuospatial memory and episodic memory in early stage PD and executive function (index of working memory, attention, planning) and visuospatial memory contributed the most to cognitive deficits ( 26 ).…”

Increased cerebral functional connectivity in ALS

“…A further potential confound could arise from insufficient matching of participants according to intellectual achievement, 39 partially mitigated by reliance on spouses volunteering for inclusion as healthy controls. Finally, CNS active medications have the potential to accentuate the group difference in FC.…”

Resting-state and vocabulary tasks distinctively inform on age-related differences in the functional brain connectome

“…Conversely, the main effect of education on FC was only detected in RS, as well as a significant interaction between age and education on fronto-parietal FC. Education level might in fact critically influence the brain's ability to use more specialized functional networks (Marques et al, 2016) and was reported to associate with increases in bilateral frontoparietal connectivity (Arenaza-Urquijo, 2013;Perry et al, 2017). The lack of significant age-education interaction on FC during vocabulary tasks remains hard to interpret and warrants further exploration using tasks drawn from a variety of cognitive contexts.…”