The Effect of Aging on Resting- State Brain Function: An fMRI Study

Background/Objective: Healthy aging may be accompanied by some types of cognitive impairment; moreover, normal aging may cause natural atrophy in the healthy human brain. The hypothesis of the healthy aging brain is the structural changes together with the functional impairment happening. The brain struggles to over-compensate for those functional agerelated impairments to continue as a healthy brain in its functions. Our goal in this study was to evaluate the effects of aging on the resting-state activation network of the brain using the multi-session probabilistic independent component analysis algorithm (PICA). Patients and Methods: We compared the resting-state brain activities between two groups of healthy aged and young subjects, so we examined 30 right-handed subjects and finally 12 healthy aging and 11 controls were enrolled in the study. Results: Our results showed that during the resting-state, older brains benefit from larger areas of activation, while in young competent brains, higher activation occurs in terms of greater intensity. These results were obtained in prefrontal areas as regions with regard to memory function as well as the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) as parts of the default mode network. Meanwhile, we reached the same results after normalization of activation size with total brain volume. Conclusion: The difference in activation patterns between the two groups shows the brain’s endeavor to compensate the functional impairment.