Differential annualized rates of hippocampal subfields atrophy in aging and future Alzheimer’s clinical syndrome

Abstract Several studies have investigated the differential vulnerability of hippocampal subfields during aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Results were often contradictory, mainly because these works were based on concatenations of cross-sectional measures in cohorts with different ages or stages of AD, in the absence of a longitudinal design. Here, we investigated 327 participants from a population-based cohort of non-demented older adults with a 14-year clinical follow-up. MRI at baseline and 4 years later were assessed to measure the annualized rates of hippocampal subfields atrophy in each participant using an automatic segmentation pipeline with subsequent quality-control. In the one hand, CA4-dentate gyrus was significantly more affected than the other subfields in the whole population (CA1-3: -0.68%/year; subiculum: -0.99%/year and CA4-DG: -1.39%/year; p