PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Battaglia, Demian
AU  - Boudou, Thomas
AU  - Hansen, Enrique C. A.
AU  - Chettouf, Sabrina
AU  - Daffertshofer, Andreas
AU  - McIntosh, A Randel
AU  - Zimmermann, Joelle
AU  - Ritter, Petra
AU  - Jirsa, Viktor
TI  - Functional Connectivity Dynamics of the Resting State across the Human Adult Lifespan
AID  - 10.1101/107243
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 107243
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/24/107243.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/24/107243.full
AB  - The aging brain undergoes alterations of both Structural Connectivity (SC) and time-averaged Functional Connectivity in the resting state (rs FC). Here, we show by means of functional MRI (fMRI) human brain imaging that aging also profoundly impacts on the spontaneous temporal reconfiguration of this rs FC. Analyzing time-dependent correlations between human rs fMRI blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) time series, we describe Functional Connectivity Dynamics (FCD) as a switching between epochs of meta-stable FC and transients of fast network reconfiguration. We find that the flux of FCD markedly slows down and becomes more “viscous” across the adult lifespan (18–80 yrs), also accounting for the wide inter-subject variability of performance observed in cognitive screening tasks. Such remodeling of FCD discloses qualitatively novel effects of aging that cannot be captured by variations of SC or of static FC, opening the way to improved imaging-based characterizations of the functional mechanisms underlying cognitive aging.HighlightsFunctional Connectivity Dynamics (FCD) at rest performs an anomalous random walk.The speed at which the flux of FCD unrolls in time slows down with aging.The “viscosity” of FCD grows, correlating with subject-specific cognitive fluency.FCD methods are complementary to structural and functional connectivity analyses.Short summary Battaglia et al. show that aging affects Functional Connectivity Dynamics (FCD) in the resting state. Analyzing human fMRI data, they find that the flux of FCD slows down and becomes more “viscous” through aging, predicting inter-subject differences in cognitive performance.