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Background

Age-specific risk and incidence of dementia appears to be decreasing internationally. A current hypothesis for this decrease is that societal investments over time have led to improvements in population health with resultant effects on cognition and brain reserve. To assess if brain reserve has indeed been increasing amongst individuals born in later decades of the 20th century, we examined whole brain volume as an indicator of global neurodegeneration from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Methods

Participants (at baseline visit: n= 1,580, age= 73.84±7.23 years,% female= 43.8%) from three diagnostic groups (cognitively normal individuals [CN](n= 407), Mild Cognitive Impairment [MCI](n= 852), and Alzheimer’s disease [AD](n= 321)) were included from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The relationship between whole brain volume (expressed as percentage of intracranial volume) and …