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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Aging Neurosci.
Sec. Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias
Volume 17 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2025.1508677
This article is part of the Research Topic Advancing Early Alzheimer's Detection Through Multimodal Neuroimaging Techniques View all 6 articles
Allostatic Load, a Measure of Cumulative Physiological Stress, Impairs Brain Structure but Not Amyloid Accumulation in Older Adults: An Exploratory Study
Provisionally accepted
Cassandre Palix 1
Léa Chauveau 1 Francesca Felisatti 1 Anne Chocat 1
Laurent Coulbaut 2 Oriane Hébert 1 Florence Mézenge 1
Brigitte Landeau 1 Sasha Haudry 1 Séverine Fauvel 1
Fabienne Collette 3
Olga Klimecki 4
Natalie Marchant 5 Vincent De La Sayette 1
Denis Vivien 6
Gael Chetelat 1
Geraldine POISNEL 1*- 1 Neuropresage Team, INSERM U1237 Physiopathologie et imagerie des troubles Neurologiques (PhIND), Caen, Lower Normandy, France
- 2 Department of Biochemistry, CHU de Caen, Caen, France
- 3 GIGA Neurosciences, GIGA Institute, University of Liège, Liege, Liege, Belgium
- 4 German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers (HZ), Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
- 5 Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, London, England, United Kingdom
- 6 INSERM U1237 Physiopathologie et imagerie des troubles Neurologiques (PhIND), Caen, Lower Normandy, France
Allostatic load (AL) is a composite score of progressive physiological dysregulations in response to longterm exposure to everyday stress. Despite growing interest, limited research has focused on links with cerebral and cognitive aspects of aging and with markers sensitive to Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a healthy elderly population and with a multimodal approach. At baseline, 111 older adults (without cognitive impairment) from the Age-Well trial completed blood and anthropometric markers collection, cognitive assessments and multimodal neuroimaging within 3 months. AL was negatively associated with gray matter volume and white matter (WM) integrity within frontal and temporal regions and poorer attentional performance. AL is linked to structural brain integrity in aging-and stress-sensitive regions but not with AD-related markers (β-amyloid load) and only in two AD-sensitive brain regions in older adults. These results highlight the potential interest of AL as a sensitive index of stress-induced brain aging.
Keywords: allostatic load, Aging, Alzheimer's disease, Neuroimaging, Cognition
Received: 09 Oct 2024; Accepted: 06 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Palix, Chauveau, Felisatti, Chocat, Coulbaut, Hébert, Mézenge, Landeau, Haudry, Fauvel, Collette, Klimecki, Marchant, De La Sayette, Vivien, Chetelat and POISNEL. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Geraldine POISNEL, Neuropresage Team, INSERM U1237 Physiopathologie et imagerie des troubles Neurologiques (PhIND), Caen, 14000, Lower Normandy, France
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