Cardiovascular risk and encoding-related hippocampal connectivity in older adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular conditions contribute to brain volume loss, reduced cerebrovascular health, and increased dementia risk in aging adults. Altered hippocampal connectivity has also been observed in individuals with cardiovascular conditions, yet the functional consequences of these changes remain unclear. In the present study, we collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data during memory encoding and used a psychophysiological interaction analysis to examine whether cardiovascular burden, indexed using the Framingham risk score, was associated with encoding-related hippocampal connectivity and task performance in cognitively-intact older adults between 65 and 85 years of age. Our goal was to better understand the early functional consequences of vascular and metabolic dysfunction in those at risk for cognitive decline. RESULTS: High Framingham risk scores were associated with lower total brain volumes. In addition, those with high Framingham risk scores showed an altered relationship between left hippocampal-medial prefrontal coupling and task performance compared to those with low Framingham risk scores. Specifically, we found a significant interaction of Framingham risk and learning on connectivity between the left hippocampus and primarily left midline prefrontal regions comprising the left ventral anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. Those with lower Framingham risk scores showed a pattern of weaker connectivity between left hippocampal and medial prefrontal regions associated with better task performance. Those with higher Framingham risk scores showed the opposite pattern; stronger connectivity was associated with better performance. CONCLUSIONS: Findings from the current study show that amongst older adults with cardiovascular conditions, higher Framingham risk is associated with lower brain volume and altered left hippocampal-medial prefrontal coupling during task performance compared to those with lower Framingham risk scores. This may reflect a compensatory mechanism in support of memory function and suggests that older adults with elevated cardiovascular risk are vulnerable to early Alzheimer disease-like dysfunction within the episodic memory system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".