The effects of age on resting state functional connectivity of the basal ganglia from young to middle adulthood

Abstract

The basal ganglia nuclei are critical for a variety of cognitive and motor functions. Much work has shown age-related structural changes of the basal ganglia. Yet less is known about how the functional interactions of these regions with the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum change throughout the lifespan. Here, we took advantage of a convenient sample and examined resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 250 adults 18 to 49 years of age, focusing specifically on the caudate nucleus, pallidum, putamen, and ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra (VTA/SN). There are a few main findings to report. First, with age, caudate head connectivity increased with a large region of ventromedial prefrontal/medial orbitofrontal cortex. Second, across all subjects, pallidum and putamen showed negative connectivity with default mode network (DMN) regions such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, in support of anticorrelation of the “task-positive” network (TPN) and DMN. This negative connectivity was reduced with age. Furthermore, pallidum, posterior putamen and VTA/SN connectivity to other TPN regions, such as somatomotor cortex, decreased with age. These results highlight a distinct effect of age on cerebral functional connectivity of the dorsal striatum and VTA/SN from young to middle adulthood and may help research investigating the etiologies or monitoring outcomes of neuropsychiatric conditions that implicate dopaminergic dysfunction.

Hemispheric lateralization of resting-state functional connectivity of the ventral striatum: an exploratory study

“…We examined whether age influences lateralization of these rsFC, as our earlier work showed age-related changes in cerebral connectivity to the dorsal striatum (Manza et al 2015). None of these regions demonstrated an fcLI in correlation with age for the entire sample (all p ’s > 0.27) or when men (all p ’s > 0.20) and women (all p ’s > 0.21) were examined separately.…”

“…Specifically, low frequency blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations reflect connectivity between functionally related brain regions (Biswal et al 1995; Fair et al 2007; Fox and Raichle 2007). Based on correlation in spontaneous BOLD activity, for instance, our recent studies have characterized whole-brain connectivity and the effects of age and medications for many cortical and subcortical areas, including the VS (Farr et al 2014; Li et al 2014; Manza et al 2015; Zhang et al 2015, 2012; Zhang and Li 2012, 2014). There has also been an accumulating literature to characterize VS rsFC during development (Fareri et al 2015; Porter et al 2015) and how VS rsFC is altered in neuropsychiatric illnesses, including depression (Leaver et al 2015), autism (Rane et al 2015), Alzheimer’s disease (Dennis and Thompson 2014), and Parkinson’s disease (Tahmasian et al 2015).…”

Deep neural network with weight sparsity control and pre-training extracts hierarchical features and enhances classification performance: Evidence from whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity patterns of schizophrenia

“…, “markedly ill” with a PANSS score of 80.06 ± 16.55) pathology (Leucht et al, 2005), respectively. Age differences between groups can influence the classification performance (Manza et al, 2015). In the study by Shen et al (2010), the ages of the participants in the HC (39.4 ± 12.7) and SZ (31.5 ± 11.1) groups were significantly different (uncorrected p = 0.02, using a two-sample t -test), whereas the ages of the participants in the two groups in our study were not (HC, 35.9 ± 13.6 vs. SZ, 35.5 ± 11.9; uncorrected p > 0.05).…”

Hemispheric Lateralization of Resting-State Functional Connectivity of the Anterior Insula: Association with Age, Gender, and a Novelty-Seeking Trait

“…RsFC characterizes how low-frequency blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations are coordinated between functionally related regions (Biswal et al, 1995; Dosenbach et al, 2007; Fox and Raichle, 2007). Using rsFC, we have previously characterized whole-brain connectivity and the effects of age and medications on many cortical and subcortical areas (Farr et al, 2014; Li et al, 2014; Manza et al, 2015; Zhang and Li, 2012, 2014; Zhang et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2015). Other investigators have used rsFC to examine functional architecture of the insula in healthy adults (Cauda et al, 2011), and explore its role in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (Tian et al, 2006), as well as depression (Liu et al, 2010) and anxiety (Baur et al, 2013).…”