How do researchers study brain aging?
The study of the neurobiology of aging is compounded by the difficulty of distinguishing “healthy” aging—brain changes that occur normally even when no disease is present—from “typical” aging, in which subtle changes that are precursors to diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or other types of dementia are already present. Recently, researchers have turned to brain scans as another means of studying changes in the brains of older adults. They are using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to examine brain shrinkage, positron emission tomography (PET) to examine metabolic changes in certain areas of the brain and map brain activity during intellectual tasks, and functional MRI, an MRI variant, to pinpoint brain activity in specific brain areas, such as the hippocampus. They can also use imaging to view changes associated with age-related dementias, such as neurofibrillary tangles and plaques. Researchers hope that these technologies can offer insight into how the brain ages as well
