Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 39, Issue 2, 15 January 2008, Pages 566-577
NeuroImage

Gender differences and age-related white matter changes of the human brain: A diffusion tensor imaging study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.09.017Get rights and content

Abstract

Cerebral white matter undergoes various changes with normal aging. This study investigated the association between age, gender, and the global and regional fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) in 145 adults (30 to 80 years old) using diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging. We studied sixteen regions of interest in both hemispheres to search for regions that display age- and gender-related white matter changes and also performed a complementary voxel-based analysis without any hypothesis a priori. On a global scale, our results indicate that the full brain FA was negatively correlated with age. The regional analysis showed that the anterior corpus callosum, the bilateral anterior and posterior internal capsule, and the posterior periventricular regions had the most significant age-related FA decrease. On the other hand, the FA in the temporal and occipital regions was not correlated with age. However, in contrast to males, females overall had a significantly lower FA in the right deep temporal regions. More gender differences in precentral, cingulate, and anterior temporal white matter areas were also found, suggesting that microstructural white matter organization in these regions may have a sexual dimorphism. Such differences were mainly due to the increase in diffusion perpendicular to fiber tracts.

Introduction

The normal adult brain undergoes considerable morphological changes as it ages. Both a decrease in brain weight and an increase in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) filled spaces, caused by ventricle dilation and sulcal enlargement, have been documented by autopsy studies (Davis and Wright, 1997, Dekaban and Sadowsky, 1978). Differences between white and gray matter loss in the aging brain have also been reported. Neuropathological studies have demonstrated that with advancing age, neuronal loss in the cortex is either not significant or not as extensive as previously reported, which suggests that white matter (WM) changes may exceed gray matter changes in normal human aging (e.g., Miller et al., 1980). Postmortem studies of normal subjects have also revealed disturbances of WM microstructure, such as a decline in amount of myelinated fibers of the precentral gyrus and the corpus callosum, or even axonal loss (Meier-Ruge et al., 1992, Kemper, 1994). However, postmortem analyses of brain structures depend on many factors, such as the interval between death and fixation and the timing of measurements. As a consequence, it might be difficult to correlate the results from postmortem studies to living subjects.

Neuroimaging technology like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has greatly enhanced the ability to perform studies on living human subjects. In this context, numerous researchers have applied morphometric MRI techniques in normal aging studies. However, some results of these studies, such as the volume change of the cerebral WM, are not consistent. Some investigations observed no significant global volume decrease in cerebral WM (Jernigan et al., 2001, Good et al., 2001, Smith et al., 2007), whereas others did show such a significant volume change, either fitted by a linear regression model (Lemaitre et al., 2005) or even higher order regression models Liu et al., 2003, Allen et al., 2005). Gender effects on global WM are also unclear, i.e., both significant (Lemaitre et al., 2005) and nonsignificant interactions (Smith et al., 2007) have been reported. Notably, the measured WM volumes, as determined from conventional MRI, only reflect the late stage of macrostructure change and may not be sensitive to the age-related degeneration of myelin and axons in the WM microstructure. Such microstructural changes are beyond the detection of conventional MRI, but are within the reach of diffusion tensor MRI (DTI) methodology.

DTI is a powerful technique for assessing the WM axonal organization – and on a more macroscopic level the 3D fiber architecture – which yields several quantitative measures, such as the three principal diffusivities (the eigenvalues of the diffusion tensor: λ1, λ2, λ3), the mean diffusivity (MD), and the degree of anisotropy (e.g., the fractional anisotropy: FA). Combined with the directional diffusion information, as derived from the eigenvectors of the diffusion tensor, these measures reflect the fiber cohesiveness of WM fiber tracts (Pierpaoli and Basser, 1996). To date, DTI studies of normal aging have identified a decline of FA and an increase of MD in several WM regions (Pfefferbaum et al., 2000, Sullivan et al., 2001, Abe et al., 2002, Salat et al., 2005a, Salat et al., 2005b). These regions include the genu and splenium of the corpus callosum, the centrum semiovale, the prefrontal WM, the posterior limb of the internal capsule, and the posterior periventricular region. However, different results in such FA alterations – based on predefined regions of interest (ROIs) – have been revealed (Pfefferbaum et al., 2000, Nusbaum et al., 2001, Sullivan et al., 2001, Salat et al., 2005a, Salat et al., 2005b). This variability may be due to the user-dependent placement of the ROIs, the number of ROIs simultaneously examined in these studies, and the difference in sample size.

In many cases, particularly in aging or neuropsychiatric disorders, the spatial location and extent of the FA changes are not known a priori. In this context, in recent years, researchers have been interested in applying global search strategies in DTI studies, such as whole-brain voxel-wise analyses (Ashburner and Friston, 2000). In this approach, each subject's data set (here, the FA image) is first registered into a standard space, in which voxel-wise statistics are calculated to find areas that correlate to a covariate of interest. In this way, both location and extent of statistically significant changes can be determined without any hypothesis a priori. However, there are two main drawbacks to such a multi-subject voxel-based DTI study. Firstly, the accuracy of matching the WM fiber structures to the standard space from each individual's FA image is very difficult to determine (Smith et al., 2006). Consequently, this raises the question of whether individual topographical variability can be taken into account. The other problem relates to the standard practice of spatially smoothing the data before computing the voxel-wise statistics. The amount of smoothing can greatly affect the final results, but there is no uniform principle for choosing an appropriate kernel size (Jones et al., 2005). Furthermore, even with a moderate amount of smoothing, a large number of voxels within the central WM regions still had nonnormally distributed residuals, thus making valid statistical inferences with a parametric approach problematic in these areas (Jones et al., 2005). One possible way to solve this problem is using nonparametric methods for inference on FA statistics. In this way, no prior information of data and noise distributions are required to perform statistical analyses (Nichols and Holmes, 2002). Furthermore, such a nonparametric approach is robust with respect to outliers that might be present due to an imperfect coregistration result. Another way is using the ‘tract-based spatial statistics’ (TBSS) approach on a voxel-wise or cluster-based level to perform the statistical analyses (Smith et al., 2006). However, although the TBSS method might reduce the amount of false positive effects (as caused by misalignment errors), spatial extent and location of significant regions are limited to the ‘skeleton’ of the brain WM, which potentially introduces an increased amount of false negative effects.

We investigated whether the MD and FA of the diffusion tensor, measured in a large number of normal subjects, are correlated with age taking potential gender differences into account. This study of normal aging combined with the exploration of gender differences can provide the baseline characteristics of MD and FA changes in normal healthy subjects across the age range of older adults, which is prerequisite for interpreting DTI data of individuals with neurological disorders or other conditions affecting the brain. Basically, the analysis in this work is performed in two steps. Firstly, we apply an image coregistration method to the FA images, and secondly, we use a permutation/randomization method to search for brain voxels that are correlated with age and gender (Nichols and Holmes, 2002). Spatial smoothing of images for whole-brain analyses remains a debatable issue (Jones et al., 2005). Therefore, in this analysis, we examined the combined age-related effect of and gender difference in diffusion MR properties in spatially nonsmoothed data sets using robust statistics.

Section snippets

Participants

The subjects in this study were recruited from a health screening program in the Shin-Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan. All participants received detailed health examinations, including physical and neurological examinations, a biochemistry study, a chest X-ray, an electrocardiogram, and an electroencephalogram. Participants were excluded if they had a history of major neurological, psychiatric, or serious cardiovascular diseases. Diffusion tensor images were obtained from 145

Mean global MD and FA analysis

Scatter plots for the association between the mean global MD, FA, and age are depicted in Fig. 2. The mean global FA change showed a significant negative correlation with age (r =  0.44, p < 0.0001). We also studied the quadratic and cubic regression model for the mean global FA as a function of age. The results showed that the linear regression model was the best model fit (i.e., only the first-degree term in the quadratic and cubic regression models showed a significant effect). Therefore, the

Global effect of age

In this study, we applied an image coregistration procedure to study the effect of age on FA, MD, and the eigenvalues in an objective and automated way, which was in good agreement with the complementary performed ROI-based analysis. The mean global FA of the normalized images showed a significant negative association with age, which has also been observed in previous studies (Salat et al., 2005a, Salat et al., 2005b, Abe et al., in press). The mean global MD showed a significantly gender

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