White matter hypointensities and hyperintensities have equivalent correlations with age and CSF β-amyloid in the nondemented elderly.

Strong correlations between WM-hyper and WM-hypo, and similar associations with age, abnormal β-amyloid, and tau suggest a general equivalence between these two imaging markers. Our work supports the equivalence of white matter hypointensity volumes derived from FreeSurfer for evaluating leukoaraiosis. This may have particular utility when T2-FLAIR is low in quality or absent, enabling analysis of older imaging data sets.