Gaby
The speed at which our bodies age and wear down doesn’t always match our chronological age. That gap helps researchers predict life expectancy and disease risk. An international team has developed a tool that estimates a person’s biological age from a single midlife brain scan.
The team built the tool using detailed health data from 1,037 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972 and 1973.
The participants’ health was tracked carefully over decades. From those observations, the researchers created a dataset reflecting each person’s biological aging. They used that dataset to train a model called DunedinPACNI (Pace of Aging Calculated from Neuroimaging). The tool quickly links the pace of aging to brain markers, according to Science Alert.
The system can rapidly and accurately estimate biological age, flag health risks, and predict the likelihood of conditions such as dementia. In other words, a single brain scan could replace many different tests.
What else is known about this innovative tool?
“This is really exciting because we captured individuals’ aging rates using health data from middle age. That lets us predict their risk of developing dementia later in life,” said neurobiologist Ahmad Hariri of Duke University in North Carolina.
He explained that DunedinPACNI uses 99 brain measures to assess aging rates, including the thickness of cortical regions involved in language and cognition and the volume of gray matter.
The researchers evaluated DunedinPACNI against data from other health studies covering more than 50,000 people. The results showed the tool effectively estimates biological age and predicts future problems such as cognitive decline and heart attacks.
They found that DunedinPACNI typically outperforms other common methods and that it accounts for differences across demographic and socioeconomic groups.
Predict ailments long before they arise
Often a person’s body is older than their chronological age. The researchers say effective measures to lower future health risks should start years or even decades before problems appear. Changes in diet and increases in physical activity are crucial.
The team is especially focused on predicting risks for different types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. As people live longer worldwide, dementia is becoming more common, and preventing its onset may be the best strategy.
“We hope DunedinPACNI will become a key tool for predicting and assessing disease risk — especially Alzheimer’s and other dementias — and for tracking disease progression,” Hariri said.
The study appears in the journal Nature Aging.
This isn’t the only recent research linking brain function to the pace of bodily aging. Recently, the website HouseWife reported on other findings suggesting the brain’s biological age helps determine lifespan.
