Characterizing the brain’s white matter microstructure is crucial for improving our understanding of healthy and diseased aging. Here we examined the ability of both traditional diffusion methods (diffusion tensor imaging) and advanced diffusion methods (tensor distribution function, neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging, mean apparent propagator MRI) to capture age and sex effects on white matter microstructure in a large sample of aging adults (15,628 UK Biobank participants; age range 45-80 years). Advanced diffusion models exhibited the greatest sensitivity to participant age and sex, suggesting that future aging studies may benefit from using advanced diffusion approaches.
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