Age-related effects on cortical thickness patterns of the Rhesus monkey brain

The Rhesus monkey is a useful model for examining age-related as well as other neurological and developmental effects on the brain, because of the extensive neuroanatomical homology to the human brain, the reduced occurrence of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, and the possibility of obtaining relevant behavioral data and post-mortem tissue for histological analyses. In this study, cortical thickness measurements based on a cortical surface modeling technique were applied for the first time to investigate cortical thickness patterns in the rhesus monkey brain, and were used to evaluate regional age related effects across a wide range of ages. Age related effects were observed in several cortical areas, in particular in the somato-sensory and motor cortices, where a robust negative correlation of cortical thickness with age was observed, similar to that found in humans. In contrast, results for monkeys compared with humans show significant interspecies differences in cortical thickness patterns in the frontal and the inferior temporal regions.