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Gender difference on cerebral blood flow in people aged over 80 years: A pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling study
Heng Zhang1, Xian Xu1, Ningyu An1, and Zhentao Zuo2

1Radiology, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China, 2State Key laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science,Institute of Biophysics,Chinese Academy of SciencesNeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, Beijing, China

Synopsis

This study focuses on cerebral blood flow(CBF) of the elderly over 80years old, with a large sample size. Different from the conclusions ofprevious studies, females brain perfusion CBF values are higher than males,in the whole brain and various brain lobes.

Purpose

This study quantitatively measured the differences in cerebral blood flow(CBF) values in people aged over 80.


Introduction

Assessment of cerebral perfusion in theelderly is important to understand the neurovascular mechanisms that underlie the reported changes and their relationship with age-related pathologies.1 Older people are at high risk for neurodegenerative disorders, and a more detailed assessment of localized brain regions is needed.2 Measuring CBF inhealthy subjects over 80 years of age is important to distinguish between normaland abnormal changes in CBF. However, gender effects on cerebral perfusionare still an open question, especially in the elderly (> 80 years).The aim of the present study was to compare the CBF values of elderly males and females ina large database and to determine which PLD time ( 2525 ms) canbetter quantify CBF values in the elderly.3

Methods

The study was performed on 100 healthy volunteers (55 males,45 females;87.1 ± 4.4/86.3 ± 3.0yrs) using GE Discovery 750 MR system with 32ch head coli to measure the cerebral blood flow (CBF) in resting state, who had no history of central nervous system disease.The CBF value was measured using the pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling(pCASL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique(PLD=2525ms). CBF maps were co-registeredto the T1 FSPGR, which was segmented into gray matter, white matter andcerebrospinal fluid using SPM12. The segmentation transformation matrix generated by the T1-weighted image was used for registration of the CBF image, and the MNI template of the Montreal Institute of Neurology was spatiallynormalized. The average CBF of gray matter was calculated.Gray matter CBF ware compared between males and females on each brain lobe.

Result

Elder women have higher CBF values compared with the same aged men in whole brain gray matter(62.22±12.95 vs 49.50±11.22 ,p<0.01). Elderly women have higher CBF values in various brain regions than older men，frontal grey matter CBF(64.58±11.32 vs 53.09±10.09,p<0.01), parietal grey matter(63.84±15.51 vs 47.25±12.23,p<0.01), temporal grey matter (63.49±13.08 vs 50.63±10.46,p<0.01)occipital grey matter(63.17±17.22 vs 46.39±13.78,p<0.01), insula(68.35±14.61 vs 51.75±12.26,p<0.01), basal ganglia (51.25±10.73 vs 43.83±10.22,p<0.01) and cerebellum(62.33±13.80 vs 50.17±11.59,p<0.01).

Conclusion

The CBF of older men over 80 years old is much lower than that of older women of the same age. These findings demonstrate that the dissociation between regional CBF and gender, and augment our understanding of mechanisms of pathology in older people.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technologyof China (grant 2015CB351701) and the National Nature Science Foundation of China (grant 31730039)

References

  1. M. Pagani, D. Salmaso, C. Jonsson, R. Hatherly, H. Jacobsson, S. A. Larsson, A. W¨agner, Regional cerebral blood flow as assessed by principal component analysis and 99m tc-hmpao spet in healthy subjects at rest: normal distribution and effect of age and gender, European journal of nuclearmedicine and molecular imaging 29 (1) (2002) 67–75.
  2. C. J. Gauthier, C. Madjar, L. Desjardins-Cr´epeau, P. Bellec, L. Bherer, R. D. Hoge, Age dependence of hemodynamic response characteristicsin human functional magnetic resonance imaging, Neurobiology of aging 34 (5) (2013) 1469–1485.
  3. W. Dai, T. Fong, R. N. Jones, E. Marcantonio, E. Schmitt, S. K. Inouye,D. C. Alsop, Effects of arterial transit delay on cerebral blood flow quantification using arterial spin labeling in an elderly cohort, Journal of MagneticResonance Imaging 45 (2) (2017) 472–481.

Figures

Note: The global brain gray matter; frontal gray matter; parietal gray matter; temporal gray matter; occipital gray matter; insula; thalamus; basalganglia; and cerebellum were assessed via an independent samples t test andpresented as the means±standard deviation.

Proc. Intl. Soc. Mag. Reson. Med. 27 (2019)
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