AUTHOR=Jorge Lília , Canário Nádia , Quental Hugo , Bernardes Rui , Castelo-Branco Miguel TITLE=Is the Retina a Mirror of the Aging Brain? Aging of Neural Retina Layers and Primary Visual Cortex Across the Lifespan JOURNAL=Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience VOLUME=11 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2019.00360 DOI=10.3389/fnagi.2019.00360 ISSN=1663-4365 ABSTRACT=

How aging concomitantly modulates the structural integrity of the brain and retina in healthy individuals remains an outstanding question. Given the strong bottom-up retinocortical connectivity, it is important to study how these structures co-evolve during healthy aging in order to unravel mechanisms that may affect the physiological integrity of both structures. For the 56 participants in the study, primary visual cortex (BA17), as well as frontal, parietal and temporal regions thicknesses were measured in T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and retinal macular thickness (10 neuroretinal layers) was measured by optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. We investigated the statistical association of these measures and their age dependence. We found an age-related decay of primary visual cortical thickness that was significantly correlated with a decrease in global and multiple layer retinal thicknesses. The atrophy of both structures might jointly account for the decline of various visual capacities that accompany the aging process. Furthermore, associations with other cortical regions suggest that retinal status may index cortical integrity in general.