Higher cortical myelin is associated with worse performance on cognitive tests: Findings from the Alzheimer’s Disease Connectome Project

Brain myelin is known to play an important role in maintaining optimal neuronal function, with deficits in myelin leading to worse performance on cognitive tests. The extent to which cortex‐specific myelin is associated with other cognitive domains, or is impacted by disease processes such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), is unknown. Here we leverage MPnRAGE‐derived quantitative R1 (Kecskemeti et al., 2016; 2018), a metric sensitive to brain myelin, to assess the role of intracortical myelin in performance on tests of executive function (exec_func), working memory (working_mem), and processing speed (process_speed) in older adults who ranged from cognitively unimpaired to those with dementia.