A single-mode associates global patterns of brain network structure and behavior across the human lifespan

Abstract

Multiple human behaviors improve early in life, peaking in young adulthood, and declining thereafter. Several properties of brain structure and function progress similarly across the lifespan. Cognitive and neuroscience research has approached aging primarily using associations between a few behaviors, brain functions, and structures. Because of this, the multivariate, global factors relating brain and behavior across the lifespan are not well understood. We investigated the global patterns of associations between 334 behavioral and clinical measures and 376 brain structural connections in 594 individuals across the lifespan. A single-axis associated changes in multiple behavioral domains and brain structural connections (r=0.5808). Individual variability within the single association axis well predicted the age of the subject (r=0.6275). Representational similarity analysis evidenced global patterns of interactions across multiple brain network systems and behavioral domains. Results show that global processes of human aging can be well captured by a multivariate data fusion approach. [147] Data availabilityThe source data are provided by the Cambridge Aging Neuroscience Project https://camcan-archive.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/. Brain data derived as part of this project and used as features for all the analyses are available on brainlife.io/pubs: Code availabilityCode is available on github at https://github.com/bcmcpher/cca_aging and as web services reproducing the analyes at