Relationships between years of education, regional grey matter volumes, and working memory-related brain activity in healthy older adults

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the relationships between educational attainment, regional grey matter volume, and functional working memory-related brain activation in older adults. The final sample included 32 healthy older adults with 8 to 22 years of education. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to measure regional volume and functional MRI was used to measure activation associated with performing an n-back task. A positive correlation was found between years of education and cortical grey matter volume in the right medial and middle frontal gyri, in the middle and posterior cingulate gyri, and in the right inferior parietal lobule. The education by age interaction was significant for cortical grey matter volume in the left middle frontal gyrus and in the right medial cingulate gyrus. In this region, the volume loss related to age was larger in the low than high-education group. The education by age interaction was also significant for task-related activity in the left superior, middle and medial frontal gyri due to the fact that activation increased with age in those with higher education. No correlation was found between regions that are structurally related with education and those that are functionally related with education and age. The data suggest a protective effect of education on cortical volume. Furthermore, the brain regions involved in the working memory network are getting more activated with age in those with higher educational attainment.

Alterations in Intra- and Interregional Intrinsic Brain Connectivity Are Differentially Associated with Memory Performance in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…This agrees with earlier observations that showed significant differences in the FC of these regions between aMCI, AD, and HC subjects [54, 55]. These regions are related to goal-directed action and compensatory cognitive function [56-58], being classified as the same functional community by functional parcellation [59]. Moreover, they are known to be components of a salience network that plays a regulatory role between AD-vulnerable and compensatory networks [56, 60].…”

Characterizing the Molecular Architecture of Cortical Regions Associated with High Educational Attainment in Older Individuals

“…The observed association between YoE and higher cortical thickness in medial prefrontal, ACC, and orbitofrontal cortices provides further converging evidence to other neuroimaging studies conducted within the CR model (Arenaza-Urquijo et al, 2013;Kim et al, 2015;Lee et al, 2016;Boller et al, 2017;Vaqué-Alcázar et al, 2017). The relevance of distinct frontal lobe areas as mediators of CR mechanisms is probably related to their key role in cognitive processes such as working memory (Owen et al, 2005;Barbey et al, 2011), cognitive conflict monitoring (Jahn et al, 2016), or decision-making (Shenhav et al, 2013).…”

Associations Between Drinking and Cortical Thickness in Younger Adult Drinkers: Findings From the Human Connectome Project

“…Selection of the covariates was based on previous work that has shown that age (e.g., Peters, ), sex (e.g., Taki et al., ), socioeconomic status (e.g., Piccolo et al., ), education (e.g., Boller et al., ), use of tobacco (e.g., Durazzo et al., ), and cannabis and other drug use (e.g., Li et al., ; Lopez‐Larson et al., ) are significantly associated with variation in cortical thickness. Twin status (i.e., monozygotic or not; dizygotic or not) was included given the twin enrichment of the HCP dataset.…”