Regional fMRI brain activation does correlate with global brain volume

Abstract

In healthy elderly participants, there has been little correlation found between measures of global brain atrophy and functional magnetic resonance imaging activated voxel counts and mean percent magnetic resonance signal change. We used a validated passive viewing task to calculate the fMRI activated voxel counts and mean percent MR signal change from the striate and ventral extrastriate cortices of 24 healthy control subjects (age range = 33-89, mean age = 66). We correlated these data with three measures of atrophy - percent brain volume, normalised brain volume and grey matter volume - to evaluate the relationship between global brain atrophy and regional fMRI activation. There was a str..