Small-worldness and modularity of the resting-state functional brain network decrease with aging

The human brain is a complex network that is known to be affected by normal aging. Graph-based analysis has been used to estimate functional brain network efficiency and effects of normal aging on small-worldness have been reported. This relationship is further investigated here along with network modularity, a statistic reflecting how well a network is organized into modules of densely interconnected nodes. Modularity has previously been observed to vary as a function of working memory capacity, therefore we hypothesized that both small-worldness and modularity would show age-related declines. We found that both small-worldness and modularity were negatively correlated with increasing age but that this decline was relatively slow.

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