Power shift and connectivity changes in healthy aging during resting-state EEG

The neural activity of human brain changes in healthy individuals during aging. The most frequent variation in patterns of neural activity are a shift from posterior to anterior areas and a reduced asymmetry between hemispheres. These patterns are typically observed during task execution and by using functional magnetic resonance imaging data. In the present study we investigated whether analogous effects can also be detected during rest and by means of source-space time series reconstructed from electroencephalographic recordings. By analyzing oscillatory power distribution across the brain we indeed found a shift from posterior to anterior areas in older adults. We additionally examined this shift by evaluating connectivity and its changes with age. The findings indicated that inter-area connections among frontal, parietal and temporal areas were strengthened in older individuals. A more complex pattern was shown in intra-area connections, where age-related activity was enhanced in parietal and temporal areas, and reduced in frontal areas. Finally, the resulting network exhibits a loss of modularity with age. Overall, the results extend to resting-state condition the evidence of an age-related shift of brain activity from posterior to anterior areas, thus suggesting that this shift is a general feature of the aging brain rather than being task-specific. In addition, the connectivity results provide new information on the reorganization of resting-state brain activity in aging.