Cognitive Reserve and Brain Maintenance: Orthogonal Concepts in Theory and Practice

Cognitive Reserve and Brain Maintenance have traditionally been understood as complementary concepts: Brain Maintenance captures the processes underlying the structural preservation of the brain with age, and might be assessed relative to age-matched peers. Cognitive Reserve, on the other hand, refe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991) N.Y. 1991), 2017-08, Vol.27 (8), p.3962-3969
Main Authors: Habeck, C, Razlighi, Q, Gazes, Y, Barulli, D, Steffener, J, Stern, Y
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Aging - pathology
Aging - psychology
Brain - diagnostic imaging
Brain - pathology
Cognitive Reserve
Computer Simulation
Educational Status
Female
Gray Matter - diagnostic imaging
Gray Matter - pathology
Humans
Independent Living
Intelligence
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Middle Aged
Models, Statistical
Neuropsychological Tests
Organ Size
Original
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Cognitive Reserve and Brain Maintenance have traditionally been understood as complementary concepts: Brain Maintenance captures the processes underlying the structural preservation of the brain with age, and might be assessed relative to age-matched peers. Cognitive Reserve, on the other hand, refers to how cognitive processing can be performed regardless of how well brain structure has been maintained. Thus, Brain Maintenance concerns the "hardware," whereas Cognitive Reserve concerns "software," that is, brain functioning explained by factors beyond mere brain structure. We used structural brain data from 368 community-dwelling adults, age 20-80, to derive measures of Brain Maintenance and Cognitive Reserve. We found that Brain Maintenance and Cognitive were uncorrelated such that values on one measure did not imply anything about the other measure. Further, both measures were positively correlated with verbal intelligence and education, hinting at formative influences of the latter to both measures. We performed extensive split-half simulations to check our derived measures' statistical robustness. Our approach enables the out-of-sample quantification of Brain Maintenance and Cognitive Reserve for single subjects on the basis of chronological age, neuropsychological performance and structural brain measures. Future work will investigate the prognostic power of these measures with regard to future cognitive status.
ISSN:1047-3211
1460-2199
DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhw208