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Principal Investigator  
Principal Investigator's Name: Florian Fischer
Institution: Universtiy Medical Center Mainz
Department: Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
Country:
Proposed Analysis: Higher general intelligence attenuates age-associated cognitive decline and the risk of dementia. Thus, intelligence has been associated with cognitive reserve or resilience in normal aging. Different from specific cognitive domains, which can be mostly allocated to specific cortical regions, intelligence is considered as a complex capacity that is more referring to global cognitive network characteristics than to specific brain areas. An association of structural brain network characteristics with intelligence has already been reported in young adults. We recently investigated the relationship between global structural brain network properties, general intelligence and age in cognitively healthy elderly. A group of (1) younger and (2) advanced elderly (N1 = 28, age 60-74 years; N2 = 15, age 75-85 years) was assessed using Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) and diffusion-tensor imaging. Structural brain networks were reconstructed individually using deterministic tractography, global network properties were determined by graph theory and correlated to intelligence scores within both age groups. Network properties were significantly correlated to age across age groups. Within age groups, network properties were significantly correlated to WAIS-R only in the advanced elderly. No significant association was observed in the younger elderly. Our data provides first evidence of an association between age-related alterations of structural brain network properties and general intelligence in advanced elderly. Interestingly, this association was not observed in younger elderly. Our findings suggest that intelligence is affected by age-related network alterations only if a certain threshold of structural degeneration is exceeded. Thus, age-related brain structural changes seem to be partially compensated by the network and the range of this compensation might be a surrogate of cognitive reserve or brain resilience. Given these results, we would like to investigate whether structural brain networks might qualify as a surrogate of cognitive reserve in patients of Alzheimer's disease.
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