The aging brain: Failure to communicate

[5 December 2007 - Howard Hughes Medical Institute via EurekAlert!] A team of Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers has shown that normal aging disrupts communication between different regions of the brain. The new research, which used advanced medical imaging techniques to look at the brain function of 93 healthy individuals from 18 to 93 years old, shows that this decline happens even in the absence of serious pathologies like Alzheimer's disease. Researchers have known for quite some time that normal aging slowly degrades bundles of axons in the central nervous system that transmit critical signals. “Our study now shows that cognitive decline in aging may be linked to disruption of communication between different regions of the brain,” said Buckner, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Harvard University. The new research, published December 6, 2007, in the journal Neuron, begins to reveal how simply growing old can affect the higher-level brain systems that govern cognition. “We may have caught the failure of communication in the act,” said Buckner. More