ArticleImaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)2025
Reliability of structural brain change in cognitively healthy adult samples.
Article in Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Long-Term Effects of a 5-Year Randomized Controlled Exercise Trial on Brain Volumes and Cognitive Function in Older Adults: A 4-Year Post-Intervention Follow-Up Study.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2026Trial
- Theoretical and practical challenges for capturing reserve and resilience in aging and Alzheimer's disease: A narrative review.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Review
- Factors Contributing to Short-Term Structural Variability in a Longitudinal MRI Dataset.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Precision estimates of longitudinal brain aging capture unexpected individual differences in one year.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Prediction of brain age using structural magnetic resonance imaging: a comparison of clinical utility of publicly available software packages.EBioMedicine · 2026Article
- Vulnerability to memory decline in aging revealed by a mega-analysis of structural brain change.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Sex differences in healthy brain aging are unlikely to explain higher Alzheimer's disease prevalence in women.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Accelerated brain ageing during the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Measurement characteristics and genome-wide correlates of lifetime brain atrophy estimated from a single MRI.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cross-Sectional Brain Age Assessments Are Limited in Predicting Future Brain Change.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Stable hippocampal correlates of high episodic memory function across adulthood.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Reevaluating the Role of Education in Cognitive Decline and Brain Aging: Insights from Large-Scale Longitudinal Cohorts across 33 Countries.Research square · 2025Article
- Reevaluating the Role of Education in Cognitive Decline and Brain Aging: Insights from Large-Scale Longitudinal Cohorts across 33 Countries.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Review
- Precision neurodiversity: personalized brain network architecture as a window into cognitive variability.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Stable individual differences dominate adult brain volume variation until later life.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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Abstract
In neuroimaging research, tracking individuals over time is key to understanding the interplay between brain changes and genetic, environmental, or cognitive factors across the lifespan. Yet, the extent to which we can estimate the individual trajectories of brain change over time with precision remains uncertain. In this study, we estimated the reliability of structural brain change in cognitively healthy adults from multiple samples and assessed the influence of follow-up time and number of observations. Estimates of cross-sectional measurement error and brain change variance were obtained using the longitudinal FreeSurfer processing stream. Our findings showed, on average, modest longitudinal reliability with 2 years of follow-up. Increasing the follow-up time was associated with a substantial increase in longitudinal reliability, while the impact of increasing the number of observations was comparatively minor. On average, 2-year follow-up studies require ≈2.7 and ≈4.0 times more individuals than designs with follow-ups of 4 and 6 years to achieve comparable statistical power. Subcortical volume exhibited higher longitudinal reliability than cortical area, thickness, and volume. The reliability estimates were comparable with those estimated from empirical data. The reliability estimates were affected by both the cohort's age where younger adults had lower reliability of change and the preprocessing pipeline where the FreeSurfer's longitudinal stream was notably superior than the cross-sectional stream. Suboptimal reliability inflated sample size requirements and compromised the ability to distinguish individual trajectories of brain aging. This study underscores the importance of long-term follow-ups and the need to consider reliability in longitudinal neuroimaging research.
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