Brain Structural Alterations Common to Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors and Alzheimer’s Dementia

Over 3,000 publications exist demonstrating that cardiovascular disease risk factors (CVD-RFs) are associated with alterations of brain structure associated with aging and dementia. Using similar neuroimaging techniques, much work has also been done illustrating the specific brain structural changes that are associated with risk for developing dementia, especially Alzheimer’s dementia. This chapter reviews the literature regarding gray matter and subcortical brain structures associated with CVD-RFs and compares it to the literature on gray matter and subcortical brain structural alterations associated with Alzheimer’s dementia. Given the enormous amount of research conducted to date, the authors provide reviews and/or meta-analyses where possible or cite examples, as opposed to providing an exhaustive list of citations when referring to this subject matter. In addition, the authors discuss how such commonalities in brain structural alterations between CVD-RFs and Alzheimer’s dementia may be used to inform brain behavior analyses with a particular focus on the graph theory analytics of tract-based structural connectomics across the spectrum of normal aging to Alzheimer’s dementia.