Spontaneous blinking and brain health in aging: Large-scale evaluation of blink-related oscillations across the lifespan

Blink-related oscillations (BROs) are newly discovered neurophysiological brainwave responses associated with spontaneous blinking, and represent environmental monitoring and awareness processes as the brain evaluates new visual information appearing after eye re-opening. BRO responses have been demonstrated in healthy young adults across multiple task states and are modulated by both task and environmental factors, but little is known about this phenomenon in aging. To address this, we undertook the first large-scale evaluation of BRO responses in healthy aging using the Cambridge Centre for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) repository, which contains magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from a large sample (N = 457) of healthy adults across a broad age range (18-88) during the performance of a simple target detection task. The results showed that BRO responses were present in all age groups, and the associated effects exhibited significant age-related modulations comprising an increase in sensor-level global field power (GFP) and source-level theta and alpha spectral power within the bilateral precuneus. Additionally, the extent of cortical activations also showed an inverted-U relationship with age, consistent with neurocompensation with aging. Crucially, these age-related differences were not observed in the behavioral measures of task performance such as reaction time and accuracy, suggesting that blink-related neural responses during the target detection task are more sensitive in capturing aging-related brain function changes compared to behavioral measures alone. Together, these results suggest that BRO responses are not only present throughout the adult lifespan, but the effects can also capture brain function changes in healthy aging-thus providing a simple yet powerful avenue for evaluating brain health in aging.