Zaiyang Long1,2, James Brown Murdoch3,
Andrew W. Goddard2,4, Ulrike Dydak1,2
1School of Health Sciences,
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States; 2Department
of Radiology & Imaging Sciences, Indiana University School of Medicine,
Indianapolis, IN, United States; 3Toshiba Medical Research
Institute USA, Mayfield Village, OH, United States; 4Department of
Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, United
States
In this study we pooled adult healthy control groups from three different studies to investigate the effect of age on GABA levels in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), occipital cortex (OCC) and thalamus, using LCModel to fit the GABA signal acquired with the MEGA-PRESS sequence. The GABA concentration was found to decrease with age in ACC (R=-0.725, p<0.05). No correlations of GABA levels with age were found in OCC and thalamus. Our study suggests that brain GABA levels decrease with age in certain cortical brain regions, which may relate to altered brain function in elderly people.