Defining overlooked structures reveals new associations between cortex and cognition in aging and Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Recent work suggests that indentations of the cerebral cortex, or sulci, may be uniquely vulnerable to atrophy in aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) and that posteromedial cortex (PMC) is particularly vulnerable to atrophy and pathology accumulation. However, these studies did not consider small, shallow, and variable tertiary sulci that are located in association cortices and are often associated with human-specific aspects of cognition. Here, we first manually defined 4,362 PMC sulci in 432 hemispheres in 216 participants. Tertiary sulci showed more age- and AD-related thinning than non-tertiary sulci, with the strongest effects for two newly uncovered tertiary sulci. A model-based approach relating sulcal morphology to cognition identified that a subset of these sulci were most associated with memory and executive function scores in older adults. These findings support the retrogenesis hypothesis linking brain development and aging, and provide new neuroanatomical targets for future studies of aging and AD.

Unique longitudinal contributions of sulcal interruptions to reading acquisition in children

“…A growing number of empirical findings identify relationships between the morphology of indentations (known as sulci) in the cerebral cortex and individual differences in cognition (e.g., as reviewed in Cachia et al, 2021;Mangin et al, 2019;Weiner, 2019Weiner, , 2023. For example, sulcal morphology in various human association cortices that have expanded significantly throughout evolution has been related to individual differences in abstract reasoning, executive function, inhibitory control, memory, face processing, and reading, as well as psychopathology (Amiez et al, 2018;Borst et al, 2014;Cachia et al, 2014;Garrison et al, 2015;Im et al, 2016;Lahutsina et al, 2023;Maboudian et al, 2024;Parker et al, 2023;Tissier et al, 2018;Voorhies et al, 2021;Willbrand et al, 2022;Yao et al, 2022). Moreover, recent research suggests that individual differences in sulcal interruptions are also related to individual differences in cognitive abilities such as numerical processing (Roell et al, 2021;Schwizer Ashkenazi et al, 2024), language and memory (Santacroce et al, 2024), and reading (Borst et al, 2016;Cachia et al, 2018).…”