Background: The association of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) with age-related vascular and neurodegenerative pathologies remains incompletely understood. Objective: The objective of this work was to elucidate the neuropathologic correlates of WMH in a large community-based cohort of older adults. Methods: Cerebral hemispheres from 603 community-based older adults were imaged with MRI ex-vivo. All participants underwent annual clinical evaluation, cognitive assessment, and neuropathologic examination. WMH burden was assessed using a modified Fazekas rating scale. Multiple ordinal logistic regression was used to test the association of WMH burden with an array of age-related neuropathologies, adjusting for demographics. Mixed effects models of cognition controlling for neuropathologies and demographics were used to determine whether WMH burden contributes to cognitive decline beyond measured pathologies. Results: WMH burden in the whole group was associated with both vascular and Alzheimer's pathologies: arteriolosclerosis (p<10 −4), gross (p<10 −4) and microscopic infarcts (p=0.04), and amyloid-β plaques (p=0.028). In non-demented participants (mild or no cognitive impairment) (N=332), WMH burden was related to gross infarcts (p=10 −4) and arteriolosclerosis (p<10 −4), but not to Alzheimer's pathology. Similarly, in those with no cognitive impairment (N=178), WMH burden was related to gross infarcts (p=8×10 −4) and arteriolosclerosis (p=0.014). WMH burden was associated with faster decline in perceptual speed in both the whole (p=0.038) and nondemented (p=0.006) groups.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Which parts of your brain help you to talk to and understand others? How about recognizing your friends by their faces? Or remembering the last time you ate your favorite dessert? In this article we describe EduCortex, a free educational tool that allows you to play with a 3D brain, to discover how different parts of the brain work together to help you do things. By clicking on the brain, you will see words that are most associated with the selected brain region. For example, by entering a word like “language,” you can see the parts of the brain related to language. EduCortex works by using an online collection of information that automatically checks over 14,000 scientific papers, to see how the content of each paper relates to different brain parts.