Analysis of functional connectivity changes from childhood to old age: A study using HCP-D, HCP-YA, and HCP-A datasets.

Abstract

We present a new clustering-enabled regression approach to investigate how functional connectivity (FC) of the entire brain changes from childhood to old age. By applying this method to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data aggregated from three Human Connectome Project studies, we cluster brain regions that undergo identical age-related changes in FC and reveal diverse patterns of these changes for different region clusters. While most brain connections between pairs of regions show minimal yet statistically significant FC changes with age, only a tiny proportion of connections exhibit practically significant age-related changes in FC. Among these connections, FC between region clusters from the same functional network tends to decrease over time, whereas FC between region clusters from different networks demonstrates various patterns of age-related changes. Moreover, our research uncovers sex-specific trends in FC changes. Females show much higher FC mainly within the default mode network, whereas males display higher FC across several more brain networks. These findings underscore the complexity and heterogeneity of FC changes in the brain throughout the lifespan.