iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

And, of course, I am also profoundly thankful to all of our co-authors and collaborators for their wisdom and insights, and everyone involved in the @biofinder.bsky.social and ADNI studies who made this work possible! 13/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Very grateful to have had the chance to work on this project. It has taught me so much and shaped how I think as a researcher. Deepest thanks to my supervisor @jwvogel.bsky.social for giving me the freedom to explore my ideas while keeping me on track when I steered off course 12/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

There’s still a lot to understand about why these patterns emerge, how they relate to cognition, what they mean at the individual level, and whether they may have clinical relevance. These are questions we are actively working on 11/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

For me, the most striking part is that these findings highlight the value of looking at the whole cortex for functional changes. What can seem like unrelated regional connectivity changes form coordinated patterns shaped by the brain’s underlying functional organization 10/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Why different axes? One idea we explore is differential cognitive pressures. In general, aging is more associated with executive decline while AD hits memory harder. Better executive performance aligned numerically more with the RE axis, better memory more with the SA axis 9/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Is this just structure or vascular damage in disguise? It seems not. The signatures survive adjusting for cortical thickness, white matter hyperintensities, lacunes, microbleeds and α-synuclein. In fact, those factors show their own axis-aligned effects, independently 8/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

There was also a shift in what the signature relates to. Before symptom onset it closely tracks AD pathology. Among cognitively impaired individuals, however, the same pattern is more strongly related to cognitive performance 7/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We then asked where the Alzheimer's-related signature sits in the disease trajectory. And found that it emerges early during pathology accumulation, and then weakens at more advanced stages 6/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We replicated the findings in an independent cohort (ADNI, n = 129), and also found that the same pattern held longitudinally: within the same individuals, increasing tau was accompanied by connectivity changes along the sensory-association axis 5/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

In 973 BioFINDER-2 participants with fMRI + CSF/PET biomarkers, we modelled age- and AD-related connectivity changes across the cortex. Two distinct patterns emerged: AD pathology → sensory-association axis (r=.74); age → representational-executive axis (r=.75) 4/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The brain's functional organization can be described by several large-scale axes. Two of the dominant ones are the sensory-association (SA) axis and the representational-executive (RE) axis. We asked if these axes could help us interpret the effects 3/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Functional connectivity captures how activity in different brain regions relates over time. Studies suggest this may be affected early in Alzheimer’s, but findings have been difficult to interpret, with a mix of increases and decreases across regions and networks 2/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The first paper from my PhD is out in Nature Neuroscience! Aging and Alzheimer's disease reshape how the brain communicates. But not in the same way: aging vs AD related alterations follow two distinct axes of brain organization Paper → www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Alzheimers #Neuroimaging 🧵⬇️

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Reposted by Jonathan Rittmo

biofinder.bsky.social @biofinder.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

New publication out in Brain! 📢We developed a data-driven multimodal biomarker framework to characterize a memory clinic cohort based on the presence, extent, and sequence of common pathologies. This framework may support diagnosis and trial selection. 🔗https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awaf411

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Jake Vogel @jwvogel.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Going to ADPD? Come see our work! We would love to share it with you and chat about it if you are interested. See below for a schedule of our sessions, which cover fMRI, proteomics, transcriptomics and AI, led by brilliant lab members @anlijuncn.bsky.social @jorittmo.bsky.social and others

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Thank you so much! Yeah, the gradients seem to be key to so many things. Will be v interested to read your paper when out!

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Massive thanks to the @biofinder.bsky.social team, @nfranzme.bsky.social team and all co-authors for sharing their data and insights – I’ve learnt so much! @rikossenkoppele.bsky.social @aitchbi.bsky.social @teanijarv.bsky.social @ted-satterthwaite.bsky.social and all non-bsky people

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

As my first PhD proj I’m v happy to finally share our findings with the world! It’s been a ride, and I am immensely grateful to the tireless @jwvogel.bsky.social for putting up with me + our team for all support: DeMON lab (@xiaoyucaly.bsky.social ‪@anlijuncn.bsky.social‬ and ppl not here) 10/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

The manuscript was written using #QuartoPub and is reproducible along with figures from start to finish with synthetic data at: github.com/DeMONLab-BioFINDER/fc_changes_follow_gradients (although it may require some initial massaging to get started) 9/

github.com

GitHub - DeMONLab-BioFINDER/fc_changes_follow_gradients

Contribute to DeMONLab-BioFINDER/fc_changes_follow_gradients development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

In sum, we reveal an elegant organizational logic behind functional brain responses to aging and AD – we show these changes to have a dynamic nature, tie to them to cognitive performance, and suggest them to be neural responses to cognitive strain 8/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Why does this happen? We hypothesize that the reason for these divergent patterns may be due to the brain trying to compensate for compromised cognitive function 7/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Why does this matter? Because these gradient-aligned FC alterations were also strongly related to cognitive function – independently of age or AD They could be signals of cognitive strain 6/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Importantly, we see longitudinal increase in AD pathology leading to similar FC patterns Using a sliding window approach in the longitudinal subsample, we also replicate the non-linear pattern seen above 5/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Much work has pointed to FC increasing in early AD only to later decline Using non-linear modelling we show that gradient-alignment seems to follow a similar trajectory: alignment happens early in the disease only to later decline 4/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

We found that age and AD systematically alter FC across the entire cortex These changes aligned w axes of brain organization which reflect core principles of cortical function: 🔹 Age → executive–nonexecutive axis (Gradient 3) 🔹 AD → sensory–association axis (Gradient 1) 3/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Prior studies of FC in age and AD have reported both hyper- and hypo-connectivity across different regions and networks, sometimes in discrepancy with one another We took a broader view and examined these changes from the lens of large scale functional organization (gradients) 2/

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

How does the brain reorganize in the context of age and AD? Are functional changes in age and AD similar? Are these changes dynamic across the age/AD spectrum? We unpack these questions in a sample of N=973 with AD biomarkers Preprint: tinyurl.com/ymv8s7h8 ⬇️🧵 1/

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biofinder.bsky.social @biofinder.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

‼️New preprint! We are happy to share our latest work led by @teanijarv.bsky.social investigating why tau pathology in AD often accumulates more in one hemisphere of the brain than the other. Check out 🔗https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.15.648728v1 or dive into the details below👇

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Jonathan Rittmo @jorittmo.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Really important and cool work by @xiaoyucaly.bsky.social! Congratulations!

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