The Brain May Not Age Quite As Quickly As We Thought

Did you know that as early as 11, our skin starts to age? And some studies even suggest that the brain begins to start aging by as early as 24.

Now new findings published in the journal Human Brain Mapping suggest that these changes may not start to slow down quite so soon.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit examined the brain via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found certain vascular (or blood vessel) changes, rather than neuronal activity itself.

Though fMRIs are oftentimes used to assess the aging brain, a fundamental problem with the measurement is that it doesn't always account for ways to measure differences in age. For instance, differences in fMRI signals can be erroneously regarded as neuronal differences.

An important line of research is to focus on controlling for noise in fMRI signals via additional baseline measures of vascular function. However, these methods now not been widely used.

For the study, Dr. Kamen Tsvetanov and colleagues studied the CamCAN project, a "data set across 335 healthy volunteers over the lifespan," that helped researchers examine the aging effects and resting state of fMRI signal amplitude.

Research showed the age differences in signal amplitude during a task of a vascular, not neuronal, origin. It also challenged previous results regarding reduced brain activity.

Furthermore, researchers believe that it may be vascular health and not brain function that accounts for most age-related differences in fMRI signals in sensory areas.

"There is a need to refine the practice of conducting fMRI. Importantly, this doesn't mean that studies lacking 'golden standard' calibration measures, such as large scale studies, patient studies or ongoing longitudinal studies are invalid. Instead, researchers should make use of available resting state data as a suitable alternative. These findings clearly show that without such correction methods, fMRI studies of the effects of age on cognition may misinterpret effect of age as a cognitive, rather than vascular, phenomena."