Functional MRI of Letter Cancellation Task Performance in Older Adults

Conclusion The present work is the first to identify neural correlates of the LCT using fMRI and tablet technology in a healthy aging population. Across all ages, the activation was found to be bilateral, including in the cerebellum, superior temporal lobe, precentral gyrus, frontal gyrus, and various occipital and parietal areas. With increasing age, performance generally decreased and brain activity was reduced in the supplementary motor area, middle and inferior frontal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, putamen and cerebellum. Better LCT performance was correlated with increased activity in the middle frontal gyrus, and reduced activity in the cerebellum. Overall, these data provide important normative baseline information that will be useful in subsequent evaluations of abnormal brain and behavior relationships, when the LCT is administered to elderly patients. Ethics Statement The study was approved by the Research Ethics Board at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada. All subjects gave written informed consent in accordance with the REB guidelines and the Declaration of Helsinki. Author Contributions NT: data collection. NT, LC, ID and NC: analysis. NT, FT, NC, SG and TS: experimental design. ID, LC and SG: manuscript preparation. ID, SG, FT, NC and TS: evaluation and interpretation of results. All authors edited the manuscript. Funding This work was supported by the Ministry of Transportation Ontario through the Road Safety Community Partnership Program...
Source: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research