Topological organization of the human brain functional connectome across the lifespan

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Michael P. Milham¹  Xiao-Wei Song²  Feng-Mei Fan³  Xi-Nian Zuo³  Xiao-Yan Cao³  Li-Li Jiang³  F. Xavier Castellanos⁴  Miao Cao⁵  Qi Dong⁵  Jin-Hui Wang⁵  Ni Shu⁵  Zheng-Jia Dai⁵  Ming-Rui Xia⁵  Yong He⁵ 

[1] Center for the Developing Brain, Child Mind Institute, New York, NY 10022, USA;Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China;Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China;Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY 10962, USA;State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & International Data Group/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;

关键词: Functional connectomics;    Lifespan trajectory;    Rich club;    Graph theory;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.dcn.2013.11.004

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Human brain function undergoes complex transformations across the lifespan. We employed resting-state functional MRI and graph-theory approaches to systematically chart the lifespan trajectory of the topological organization of human whole-brain functional networks in 126 healthy individuals ranging in age from 7 to 85 years. Brain networks were constructed by computing Pearson's correlations in blood-oxygenation-level-dependent temporal fluctuations among 1024 parcellation units followed by graph-based network analyses. We observed that the human brain functional connectome exhibited highly preserved non-random modular and rich club organization over the entire age range studied. Further quantitative analyses revealed linear decreases in modularity and inverted-U shaped trajectories of local efficiency and rich club architecture. Regionally heterogeneous age effects were mainly located in several hubs (e.g., default network, dorsal attention regions). Finally, we observed inverse trajectories of long- and short-distance functional connections, indicating that the reorganization of connectivity concentrates and distributes the brain's functional networks. Our results demonstrate topological changes in the whole-brain functional connectome across nearly the entire human lifespan, providing insights into the neural substrates underlying individual variations in behavior and cognition. These results have important implications for disease connectomics because they provide a baseline for evaluating network impairments in age-related neuropsychiatric disorders.

【 授权许可】

Unknown