Functional neuroimaging as a tool to understand social determinants of health in cognitive aging and ADRD: a scoping review
Abstract
The social, structural, and physical conditions in which individuals live, work, and age, collectively termed social determinants of health (SDOH), are associated with risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Differences in brain function in later life may offer understanding of how SDOH become biologically embedded and confer differential ADRD risk. However, how functional neuroimaging techniques have been used to study SDOH in cognitive aging and ADRD has yet to be systematically characterized. We therefore conducted a scoping review. Three databases were searched, 2,930 articles were screened, and 41 studies were included. Education was the most frequently studied SDOH domain, accounting for 65.9% (k = 27) of studies, followed by economic and occupation (k = 9, 22.0%), social and community (k = 5, 12.2%), food (k = 4, 9.8%), and physical environment (k = 3, 7.3%). Of the 41 studies, five (12.2%) examined multidomain determinants and one study (2.4%) examined three determinants each from different domains. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was most frequently employed (k = 31, 75.6%), followed by electroencephalography (EEG; k = 7, 17.1%), and magnetoencephalography (MEG; k = 4, 9.8%). One study (2.4%) employed a multimodal approach, while none used functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Resting state paradigms (k = 27, 65.9%) outnumbered task-based (k = 14, 34.1%) and most studies were cross-sectional (k = 38, 92.7%). The predominant focus on education, fMRI, and cross-sectional designs highlights many opportunities for future investigation of how SDOH may be associated with later life brain function.
Related
- Functional brain activity in cancer-related cognitive impairment: a scoping review of EEG studies
- An adolescent neuroimaging database combining movie-watching, eye-tracking and cognitive tasks
- Supervised Domain Adaptation Mitigates Cross-Ethnicity Prediction Error in Neuroimaging Based Cognitive Prediction
- A Multimodal Neuroimaging Study of Hyperlipidemia-Induced Abnormal Spontaneous Brain Activity and Cognitive Decline.
- The perioperative sensory–cognitive interface: multimodal neuroimaging of hierarchical network reconfiguration in perioperative neurocognitive disorders
BibTeX
@misc{jenkins2026functional,
title = {{Functional neuroimaging as a tool to understand social determinants of health in cognitive aging and ADRD: a scoping review}},
author = {Jade E. Jenkins and Adea Rich and Isabella Manrique and Shirine Moukaled and Natalie L. Marchant and Owen Carmichael},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/m8bue_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/m8bue_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Functional neuroimaging as a tool to understand social determinants of health in cognitive aging and ADRD: a scoping review
AU - Jade E. Jenkins
AU - Adea Rich
AU - Isabella Manrique
AU - Shirine Moukaled
AU - Natalie L. Marchant
AU - Owen Carmichael
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/m8bue_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/m8bue_v1/
AB - The social, structural, and physical conditions in which individuals live, work, and age, collectively termed social determinants of health (SDOH), are associated with risk of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Differences in brain function in later life may offer understanding of how SDOH become biologically embedded and confer differential ADRD risk. However, how functional neuroimaging techniques have been used to study SDOH in cognitive aging and ADRD has yet to be systematically characterized. We therefore conducted a scoping review. Three databases were searched, 2,930 articles were screened, and 41 studies were included. Education was the most frequently studied SDOH domain, accounting for 65.9% (k = 27) of studies, followed by economic and occupation (k = 9, 22.0%), social and community (k = 5, 12.2%), food (k = 4, 9.8%), and physical environment (k = 3, 7.3%). Of the 41 studies, five (12.2%) examined multidomain determinants and one study (2.4%) examined three determinants each from different domains. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was most frequently employed (k = 31, 75.6%), followed by electroencephalography (EEG; k = 7, 17.1%), and magnetoencephalography (MEG; k = 4, 9.8%). One study (2.4%) employed a multimodal approach, while none used functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Resting state paradigms (k = 27, 65.9%) outnumbered task-based (k = 14, 34.1%) and most studies were cross-sectional (k = 38, 92.7%). The predominant focus on education, fMRI, and cross-sectional designs highlights many opportunities for future investigation of how SDOH may be associated with later life brain function.
ER -