Citation

Noohi F, Kinnaird C, De Dios Y, Kofman I, Wood SJ, Bloomberg JJ, Mulavara AP, Sienko KH, Polk TA, Seidler RD. PLoS One 2019; 14(9): e0221954.

Affiliation

Department of Applied Physiology & Kinesiology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0221954

PMID

31513630

Abstract

Aging is associated with peripheral and central declines in vestibular processing and postural control. Here we used functional MRI to investigate age differences in neural vestibular representations in response to pneumatic tap stimulation. We also measured the amount of body sway in multiple balance tasks outside of the MRI scanner to assess the relationship between individuals' balance ability and their vestibular neural response. We found a general pattern of activation in canonical vestibular cortex and deactivation in cross modal sensory regions in response to vestibular stimulation. We found that activation amplitude of the vestibular cortex was correlated with age, with younger individuals exhibiting higher activation. Deactivation of visual and somatosensory regions increased with age and was associated with poorer balance. The results demonstrate that brain activations and deactivations in response to vestibular stimuli are correlated with balance, and the pattern of these correlations varies with age. The findings also suggest that older adults exhibit less sensitivity to vestibular stimuli, and may compensate by differentially reweighting visual and somatosensory processes.

Language: en