Schedule of Events | Symposia

Association Between GABA and Verbal Fluency Task Performance in Healthy Aging

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Kyla Gibney¹ (kgibney@stjude.org), Areeb Khan², Sabah Nisar³, Ritambhar Burman³, Kasturee Chakraborty³, Brian Potter¹, Pat Hanby³, Stephanie Guthrie¹, Melissa Hudson^4,5, Kiri Ness⁵, Belinda Mandrell⁶, Kevin Krull¹, Cai Li², Puneet Bagga³; ¹St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Department of Psychology and Biobehavioral Sciences, ²St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Department of Biostatistics, ³St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Department of Diagnostic Imaging, ⁴St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Department of Oncology, ⁵St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Department of Epidemiology, ⁶St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Department of Nursing Research

Cognitive and neurometabolic changes are normal consequences of healthy aging, but we don’t fully understand how specific neurometabolites relate to cognitive function during aging. This study quantifies the association between neurometabolite concentrations and executive function in healthy adults. We performed proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) in healthy participants (N=35) with regions of interest in the left cerebellum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). A subset (n=28) of participants aged 21 to 58 years (mean 40.3 ± 10.8, 11 Females) also completed neuropsychological testing, including the Trail Making Test (TMT), The Symbol Digit Coding Task, The Digit Span Backward (DSB) Task, and the Verbal Fluency Task (VerFlu) from the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System. Linear regression modeled the association between neurocognitive performance and metabolites controlling for age and sex. All neurocognitive tests are z-scored, with a higher score indicating better performance. We found no significant effect of age or sex on neurocognitive performance. In the left dlPFC, NAA (β=-0.0066, CI= [-0.01, -0.002]) and Glu (β=-0.0076, CI= [-0.011, -0.0042]) were negatively associated with age, which mirrors the literature describing altered brain mitochondrial function during aging. VerFlu was positively associated with GABA in the left dlPFC (β=15.73, CI= [4, 27.46]). Meanwhile, the Coding Task was negatively associated with Glx (β=-2.76, CI= [-4.53, -0.99]) in the left cerebellum. Our findings with GABA may reflect a potential need for inhibitory control mechanisms when engaging in higher-order language processing, and the association with cerebellar Glx could indicate the need for cerebro-cerebellar relay when completing cognitively demanding tasks.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Development &aging