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

. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder.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 Kuhn, T., Ph.D. 21 Despite these limitations, the findings of the current study support the hypothesis of HIV-associated augmented brain aging and provide a unique contribution to the existing literature by demonstrating that the mechanism by which this process occurs in WM microstructure appears to be related to HIV-associated neurodegeneration, including axonal injury, loss of axonal density and reduced patency of axons that likely occurs via similar cellular mechanisms as typical aging. Importantly, neuroimagederived age predictors may indeed be biomarkers of normal and pathologic aging processes. Therefore, this technique may be generalizable to other disease processes which may affect the aging process, including neurodegenerative disorders (e.g.