Free water imaging in healthy brain aging and first signs of brain pathology

Brain aging is associated with cerebral small vessel disease (SVD). Recently, it was suggested that SVD is mainly driven by increases of extracellular free water (FW). The aim of the present study was to examine the association of FW, conventional and FW‐corrected diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) parameters (fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), radial diffusivity (RD), axial diffusivity (AD)) with aging. The second aim was to determine if differences in FW and DTI parameters exist between individuals with first signs of pathology and healthy elderly controls regarding metrics that are not associated with age.