Different functional connectivity gradients reflect aging and Alzheimer's disease.
- Open access
Distinct functional connectivity gradients reveal that aging and Alzheimer's disease alter separate major brain communication pathways, with AD affecting sensory-association and aging impacting representation-executive axes.
- Why it matters: Understanding how large-scale brain communication patterns change with age and disease is crucial for developing targeted interventions and improving diagnostic accuracy, yet these dynamics are not well characterized across the entire cortex.
- What they did: The study analyzed functional connectivity in two large cohorts (BioFINDER-2 and ADNI, total N=1102) to identify how aging and AD-related changes align with fundamental hierarchical brain axes, focusing on sensory-association and representation-executive pathways.
- The result: Findings demonstrate that AD pathology and cognitive decline are linked to changes along the sensory-association axis, while age-related functional shifts occur along the representation-executive axis, highlighting orthogonal pathways affected by aging and disease.