Brain Glucose Metabolism and Memory Functions: Age Decrease in Factor Scores.

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Abstract
The F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) scan method with positron emission tomography was used to determine age differences in factors underlying both the performances on 18 multivariate memory tests and the rates of cerebral glucose utilization in nine left and nine right hemispheric regions of 23 healthy adults aged 27 to 78 years. Two of the five derived factors separated persons below age 42 from those above age 48 years, one reflecting secondary memory for material verbally processed together with broca's metabolic ratio, the other defined by tests requiring sequential or organizational coding of information and metabolic measures of thalamic regions. Education did not override their parallel age decrease. Several regional metabolic measures covaried with distinct memory measures. Persons with high superior frontal and low caudate-thalamic metabolic measures were those who performed well in tests of memory for sentences, story, designs, and complex patterns, suggesting a frontal-subcortical interaction in agedependent memory processing.