Abstrakt
This chapter provides an overview of the structure of the cerebellum, the current concepts of the cerebellar function, and its decline associated with aging-from macrostructural, functional, histological, biochemical, and epigenetic perspectives. Several candidate hypotheses are discussed to explain the seemingly contradictory lower epigenetic age of the cerebellum relative to the rest of the brain, but also a rate of atrophy far higher than seen in other parts of the brain with the exception of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, with both structural damage to cerebellar white matter and loss of cerebellar neurons.
The cerebellum is hypothesized to create new neural scaffolds to counteract aging-related changes and maintain its performance. If sufficient informational input is provided as in simpler motor tasks, while signal noise due to white matter affections in complex, extensive cognitive networks do not allow for the construction and utilization of cerebellar internal models, leading ultimately to the failure of cerebellar feedforward processing stream.