Ford, Andrew H.Garrido, Griselda J.Beer, ChristopherLautenschlager, Nicola T.Arnolda, LeonardFlicker, LeonAlmeida, Osvaldo P.2015-10-142015-10-141932-6203http://hdl.handle.net/1885/15913BACKGROUND Elevated total plasma homocysteine (tHcy) has been associated with cognitive impairment, vascular disease and brain atrophy. METHODS We investigated 150 volunteers to determine if the association between high tHcy and cerebral grey matter volume and cognitive function is independent of cardiovascular disease. RESULTS Participants with high tHcy (≥15 µmol/L) showed a widespread relative loss of grey matter compared with people with normal tHcy, although differences between the groups were minimal once the analyses were adjusted for age, gender, diabetes, hypertension, smoking and prevalent cardiovascular disease. Individuals with high tHcy had worse cognitive scores across a range of domains and less total grey matter volume, although these differences were not significant in the adjusted models. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that the association between high tHcy and loss of cerebral grey matter volume and decline in cognitive function is largely explained by increasing age and cardiovascular diseases and indicate that the relationship is not causal.The study was supported by a competitive project grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC grant number: 403996).7 pages© 2012 Ford et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.agedaged, 80 and overatrophybraincardiovascular diseasescognition disorderscross-sectional studiesfemalehomocysteinehumansmagnetic resonance imagingmalemiddle aged2012-03-0710.1371/journal.pone.00333452015-12-08