Cortical thickness changes related to the processes of maturation and aging in healthy brains

Normal aging is accompanied by global as well as regional structural changes. While these age-related changes in gray matter volume have been extensively studied, less has been done using newer morphological indexes, such as cortical thickness and surface area and the studies usually focus on subjects older than 19. Here, we analyzed structural images of 143 healthy volunteers, ranging from 6 to 86 years of age, using FreeSurfer to support the parcellation, and proposed a way to compute the regional changes of cortical thickness that occurs in human brains from childhood to elderliness. We separated the whole process in two stages: maturation and aging, and compute the best threshold for each region, allowing to identify when those processes begin, their velocities and the relation to some degenerative diseases.