{
  "id": 2934576,
  "title": "Human alpha frequency and expression across the lifespan: a 2,172-participant electrophysiology-MRI atlas",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/17/human-alpha-frequency-and-expression-across-the-lifespan-a-2-172",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-08-17T00:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "bioRxiv",
    "slug": "biorxiv",
    "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743541v1?rss=1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "A comprehensive study involving 2,172 participants aged between 5.0 and 89.2 years has investigated the relationship between human alpha frequency (IAF) and the brain's structure across the lifespan. The researchers hand-validated IAF, which is a scale-invariant measure of alpha expression, and processed T1-weighted MRI scans using FreeSurfer. Prior to combining the electrophysiological measurements, the team inspected retained posterior spectra from 2,483 participants from EEG and MEG cohorts to ensure that absolute spectral power could not be compared across datasets due to differing units and scales depending on the recording and processing methods.\n\nThe results indicate that IAF increases during development and remains high throughout a significant portion of adulthood before declining later in life. Normalized alpha expression also changes with age (R2=0.387), although its adult course differs from that of IAF. The study found that total gray matter and cerebral white matter follow different age trajectories, with IAF showing a closer correlation with white matter in both level and rate of change compared to gray matter. This ordering held across various spline degrees of freedom.\n\nWhen limiting the comparison to the ages of 10-80 and using a more flexible 7-df curve, the level ranking between gray and white matter reversed, with gray matter correlating more weakly (r=0.81) with white matter (r=0.74). However, the derivatives continued to show a stronger correlation with white matter (r=0.86) than with gray matter (r=-0.19). These findings were sensitive to age intervals and developmental cohort support, but were not cohort-independent.\n\nIn adults aged 24 years and older, no cortical-area relations with IAF survived false-discovery-rate correction. Normalized alpha expression was positively related to cortical area in 57 of 70 hemisphere-specific regions, with two planned posterior tests showing small effects. One posterior test found a relationship between the bilateral superior-inferior pial-surface centroid of the visual composite and IAF (partial r=0.101, q=0.027), while another found a relationship between visual cortical volume and normalized expression (partial r=0.139, q=5.0 x 10^-5).\n\nWhen considering leave-one-dataset-out models, IAF and normalized expression provided little anatomical information beyond age and sex. The weighted held-out correlation increased minimally (from 0.006 to 0.021) when both alpha measures were added, suggesting that age is the primary organizer of alpha frequency. Normalized alpha expression is a related but distinct phenotype. The study concludes that conventional macrostructure places modest constraints on these measures, primarily through cortical scale, but does not offer a robust and universally applicable explanation of individual adult IAF.",
  "summary": "Individual alpha frequency (IAF) and alpha amplitude are familiar features of human electrophysiology, but their relation to age and brain structure has been difficult to establish from studies confined to one part of life, one recording method, or samples without structural MRI. We assembled a cross-dataset atlas of 2,172 participants, 5.0-89.2 years of age, with hand-validated posterior IAF, a…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}