Turkish Journal of
GERIATRICS

Hacettepe Üniversitesi Tıp Eğitimi ve Bilişimi Anabilim Dalı, ANKARA Some changes and developments occur in aging in human life. These developments can be in both anatomical and cognitive direction. Especially in the brain, structural, neurochemical, functional and physiological changes take part regionally or as a whole. In the last decade, scientists found certain types of changes including cortical thinning, shrinkage and synaptic loss. In these studies, although there are supplementary and supporting findings, some studies are in contradiction for special changes. But in general, most of the studies showed that the biggest changing and most of the changing types occurs in prefrontal cortex and this region is very important for understading the aging. In this subject, brain reorganization may be the most complicated problem for the scientists and there are different approaches for this problem. In this study, a critical review of cerebral cortex's age-related changes was done in the means of different areas like functional, cognitive, structural and physiological. Also sections of development of the brain, major age-related changes in the brain and age-related regional changes were given for doing a comparison among the studies. Keywords : Cerebral cortex, Aging, Age-related changes