White matter trajectories over the lifespan.

Abstract

White matter (WM) changes occur throughout the lifespan at a different rate for each developmental period. We aggregated 10879 structural MRIs and 6186 diffusion-weighted MRIs from participants between 2 weeks to 100 years of age. Age-related changes in gray matter and WM partial volumes and microstructural WM properties, both brain-wide and on 29 reconstructed tracts, were investigated as a function of biological sex and hemisphere, when appropriate. We investigated the curve fit that would best explain age-related differences by fitting linear, cubic, quadratic, and exponential models to macro and microstructural WM properties. Following the first steep increase in WM volume during infancy and childhood, the rate of development slows down in adulthood and decreases with aging. Similarly, microstructural properties of WM, particularly fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD), follow independent rates of change across the lifespan. The overall increase in FA and decrease in MD are modulated by demographic factors, such as the participant's age, and show different hemispheric asymmetries in some association tracts reconstructed via probabilistic tractography. All changes in WM macro and microstructure seem to follow nonlinear trajectories, which also differ based on the considered metric. Exponential changes occurred for the WM volume and FA and MD values in the first five years of life. Collectively, these results provide novel insight into how changes in different metrics of WM occur when a lifespan approach is considered.