Automated Segmentation of the Hypothalamus: Associations of Age and Socioeconomic Status with Subunit Volumes in Cognitively Healthy Adults

Older age in cognitively healthy adults is linked to smaller normalised volumes of the right posterior hypothalamic subunit (r = -.456, q < .001) and left posterior subunit (r = -.274, q = .007).

• Why it matters: Hypothalamic subunits are hard to measure in vivo due to small size and unclear boundaries, limiting tests of how ageing and socioeconomic status relate to brain structure in healthy people.
• What they did: Using OASIS-1 cross-sectional data (n = 416; analysed: 133 with Clinical Dementia Rating 0, ages 33–94), a FreeSurfer-based convolutional neural network segmented five subunits per hemisphere; volumes were normalised to eTIV and correlated with age and Hollingshead SES using Pearson correlations with Benjamini-Hochberg FDR, plus partial correlations adjusting for sex and for age and sex.
• The result: Lower SES showed a trend toward larger left anterior-inferior volume (r = .242, uncorrected p = .005) but did not survive FDR correction (q = .053), while the age–posterior associations persisted after sex adjustment.

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