Water homeostasis in brain involves the fluid dynamic through the intracellular fluid, extracellular fluid and CSF, and it’s important to help maintaining the brain function. The change of water compartments with aging may reflect the physiology and pathophysiology of the brain. We mapped the brain CSF water fraction, myelin water fraction and intro-extracellular water fraction using an MR FAST-T2 relaxometry approach. We found the brain CSF water quadratically increases with normal aging. Myelin water increases before the 50s and then decrease in adults. Intro-extracellular water decreases in the adult lifespan. This results are impactful for understanding the glymphatic clearance mechanism.
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Zhou et al. (2024) studied this question.
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