Age-Dependent Changes in the Ability to Encode a Novel Elementary Motor Memory

In healthy individuals, motor training elicits cortical plasticity that encodes the kinematic details of the practiced movements and is thought to underlie recovery of function after stroke. The influence of age on this form of plasticity is incompletely understood. We studied 55 healthy subjects and identified a substantial decrease in training-dependent plasticity as a function of age in the absence of differences in training kinematics. These results suggest that the ability of the healthy aging motor cortex to reorganize in response to training decreases with age. Ann Neurol 2003;53:521–524 The neural substrates underlying performance of a motor task change with age. In the presence of stable motor output, the involvement of various components of the functional network involved in motor performance increase with advancing age. 1,2 It has been proposed that such reorganization may play a compensatory role 3 to sustain stable motor performance in the presence of deteriorating morphological and neurochemical substrates. 4