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. 2008 Jul 9;28(28):7031-5.
doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0742-08.2008.

Training-induced brain structure changes in the elderly

Janina Boyke  1 , Joenna Driemeyer, Christian Gaser, Christian Büchel, Arne May
Affiliations

Training-induced brain structure changes in the elderly

Janina Boyke et al. J Neurosci. .

Abstract

It has been suggested that learning is associated with a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in healthy young volunteers. It is not clear whether and to what extent the aging brain is still able to exhibit such structural plasticity. We built on our original study, now focusing on healthy senior citizens. We observed that elderly persons were able to learn three-ball cascade juggling, but with less proficiency compared with 20-year-old adolescents. Similar to the young group, gray-matter changes in the older brain related to skill acquisition were observed in area hMT/V5 (middle temporal area of the visual cortex). In addition, elderly volunteers who learned to juggle showed transient increases in gray matter in the hippocampus on the left side and in the nucleus accumbens bilaterally.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Flow chart of volunteer recruitment. Only 10 of 44 individuals were able to juggle 60 s at time point 2. Fifteen volunteers were fluent jugglers and accomplished between 40 and 60 s. We therefore compared the data of 25 individuals of the jugglers group who had the best results in endurance juggling (mean time, 56.7 s) with the data sets of the 25 controls.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Time point (before intervention, after intervention) by group (jugglers, controls) interaction analysis, testing for greater changes in the jugglers group. Gray-matter increase is shown superimposed on a normalized T1 image. The left side of the picture is the left side of the brain. A, A significant gray-matter expansion was found in hMT/V5 on the right side. This area is virtually the same area as demonstrated previously (Draganski et al., 2004). The box plot shows relative gray-matter change in the peak voxel in the right hMT for all jugglers over the three time points (error bars indicate the SD, range, and the mean for each time point). B, C, Only the jugglers group, but not the controls, showed a significant gray-matter increase in the hippocampus on the left side (B) and the nucleus accumbens bilaterally (C). This increase of gray matter reversed when study participants were examined at time point 3 (after the weeks without practicing).
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