An Augmented Aging Process in Brain White Matter in HIV

T. Kuhn; T. Kaufmann; N.T. Doan; L.T. Westlye; J. Jones; R.A. Nunez; S.Y. Bookheimer; E.J. Singer; C.H. Hinkin; A.D. Thames

This study used machine learning along with a large training data set of normal WM aging to examine HIV-associated WM microstructural alterations and related this WM degeneration to cognitive impairment. Using an SVR trained with this healthy aging cohort to reliably predict participant age based on metrics of WM microstructure, we found that the brain WM age difference (BAG) was significantly higher in our HIV+ group than in the highly comparable HIV-group. Further, BAG widened with increasing age, suggesting that advancing age is a risk factor for neurodegeneration. Additionally, larger BAG was associated with worse cognitive performance, indicating that this . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/265199 doi: bioRxiv preprint 15 Kuhn, T., Ph.D. 15 neurodegeneration may be related to deleterious changes in cognition. Although chronological age was not significantly correlated with prediction error, confirmatory analyses verified that these significant associations between BAG and cognitive performance remained after controlling for participant true age.