Lirong Yan1, Yan Zhuo1, Bo Wang1, Rong Xue1, Geoffrey Aguirre2, Jiongjiong Wang3
1State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, CAS, Beijing, China; 2Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA; 3Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis whether the magnitude of low frequency fluctuations (<0.1Hz) in resting BOLD fMRI can be used to study aging effects. Multi-echo BOLD fMRI data were acquired both during resting state and visual stimulation in young and elderly healthy subjects. There were linear correlations between BOLD signal changes during activation and low frequency physiological fluctuations at rest in both age groups. And the association between BOLD activation and low frequency fluctuation was stronger in the young group than in the elderly group both across subjects and across activated pixels in visual cortex.