The olfactory system plays a pivotal role in driving behavioral responses that are critical to survival. In particular, the decline in ability to detect and discriminate odors in aged humans lead to an overall decrease in quality of life. However, our present understanding of olfactory dysfunction in aging brains beyond the cellular and micro-circuit level is scarce and incomplete. In this study, we deployed optogenetic fMRI to reveal the changes of brain-wide odor-associated regions brought about by aging in an accelerated aging rat model. We found diminished activations brain-wide indicating dysfunction at the systems level across multiple long-range olfactory pathways.
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