A fMRI study of age-related differential cortical patterns during cued motor movement

Healthy adults of three age groups (young, middle-age and older) were cued by a multimedia projector to perform a series of simple (making a fist, opening/closing of the mouth) and complex (opposition of index finger and thumb, chewing gum) motor tasks while being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our results showed that in unilateral hand movements, the premotor/motor cortex in the contralateral hemisphere was most strongly activated. Supplementary motor cortex involvement was usually present in the young and not in the old, except in precision movement when supplementary motor cortex was also involved in the old. For movements of the face (chewing, opening and closing of mouth), the prefrontal cortex was activated in the old age group but finger and hand movements never activated the prefrontal cortex in any age. Furthermore, areas like insula and cingulate gyrus might be activated in motor tasks. We conclude that different motor activities triggered diverse activation patterns which differed in different age groups.