Resting-state functional connectivity in anterior cingulate cortex in normal aging

Ask your doctor to compare your brain connectivity post-stroke to what is normal at your age and if any deficits are found propose a stroke protocol to correct them.  Your doctor has no stroke protocols and has no idea what this means? Why the hell are you seeing such as worthless doctor?
But don't listen to me, as a non-medical stroke-addled person I can have no coherent thoughts on what the fucking hell is wrong  with stroke rehabilitation.  Does your doctor have a single coherent thought on stroke rehab? I dare you to challenge your doctor to explain exactly how you are going to 100% recover. No excuses from your doctor.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnagi.2014.00280/full?

Weifang Cao¹, Cheng Luo^1*, Bin Zhu¹, Dan Zhang¹, Li Dong¹, Jinnan Gong¹, Diankun Gong¹, Hui He¹, Shipeng Tu¹, Wenjie Yin², Jianfu Li¹, Huafu Chen¹ and Dezhong Yao^1*

• ¹The Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
• ²Radiology Department, Chengdu First People's Hospital, Chengdu, China

Growing evidence suggests that normal aging is associated with cognitive decline and well-maintained emotional well-being. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is an important brain region involved in emotional and cognitive processing. We investigated resting-state functional connectivity (FC) of two ACC subregions in 30 healthy older adults vs. 33 healthy younger adults, by parcellating into rostral (rACC) and dorsal (dACC) ACC based on clustering of FC profiles. Compared with younger adults, older adults demonstrated greater connection between rACC and anterior insula, suggesting that older adults recruit more proximal dACC brain regions connected with insula to maintain a salient response. Older adults also demonstrated increased FC between rACC and superior temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, decreased integration between rACC and default mode, and decreased dACC-hippocampal and dACC-thalamic connectivity. These altered FCs reflected rACC and dACC reorganization, and might be related to well emotion regulation and cognitive decline in older adults. Our findings provide further insight into potential functional substrates of emotional and cognitive alterations in the aging brain.