Background Methods ENIGMA Lifespan

The ENIGMA Lifespan working group brings together structural MRI brain scans from Brain structure volumes change throughout life, with different trajectories for different structures. The Lifespan Working group was set up as part of the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) Consortium (Thompson et al., 2014) to study brain changes over the human lifespan harnessing the power of large-scale multimodal datasets. This initiative aims to overcome limitations of previous research associated with small sample sizes, restricted age ranges within individual samples and wide methodological differences in delineation of brain structures. Here we focused on subcortical areas, vital for cognitive and emotional adaptation to daily life, across the lifespan (Grossberg, 2009). These regions play a role in the development of cognitive and affective dysfunctions (Fredo et al., 2014) and are implicated in numerous psychiatric (Bose et al., 2009) and degenerative brain disorders (Driscoll et al., 2009). The caudate, putamen and nucleus accumbens declined nonlinearly with age while age-related volume reduction was approximately linear and most pronounced for the pallidum. The hippocampal volume changed the least with age, while both th