Research Paper Volume 14, Issue 2 pp 923—942
Age-related alterations of brain metabolic network based on [18F]FDG-PET of rats
- 1 School of Rehabilitation Science, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai 201203, China
- 2 Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai 200437, China
- 3 Department of Traumatology and Orthopedics, Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai 200437, China
- 4 Engineering Research Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine Intelligent Rehabilitation, Ministry of Education, Shanghai 201203, China
Received: August 28, 2021 Accepted: January 14, 2022 Published: January 25, 2022
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203851How to Cite
Copyright: © 2022 Xue et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Using animal models to study the underlying mechanisms of aging will create a critical foundation from which to develop new interventions for aging-related brain disorders. Aging-related reorganization of the brain network has been described for the human brain based on functional, metabolic and structural connectivity. However, alterations in the brain metabolic network of aging rats remain unknown. Here, we submitted young and aged rats to [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose with positron emission tomography (18F-FDG PET) and constructed brain metabolic networks. The topological properties were detected, and the network robustness against random failures and targeted attacks was analyzed for age-group comparison. Compared with young rats, aged rats showed reduced betweenness centrality (BC) in the superior colliculus and a decreased degree (D) in the parietal association cortex. With regard to network robustness, the brain metabolic networks of aged rats were more vulnerable to simulated damage, which showed significantly lower local efficiency and clustering coefficients than those of the young rats against targeted attacks and random failures. The findings support the idea that aged rats have similar aging-related changes in the brain metabolic network to the human brain and can therefore be used as a model for aging studies to provide targets for potential therapies that promote healthy aging.
Abbreviations
18F-FDG PET: [18F]Fluorodeoxyglucose with positron emission tomography; Lp: path length; Cp: clustering coefficient; Eglob: global efficiency; Eloc: local efficiency; BC: betweenness centrality; D: degree; Enod: node efficiency; SUV: standard uptake value; AUC: area under the curve.