August 22, 2024
3 min read
Brains Age in Five Different Ways
Brain scan study hints that methods could be developed to detect the earliest stages of neurodegenerative disease
An analysis of almost 50,000 brain scans has revealed five distinct patterns of brain atrophy associated with aging and neurodegenerative disease. The analysis has also linked the patterns to lifestyle factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as to genetic and blood-based markers associated with health status and disease risk.
The work is a “methodological tour de force” that could greatly advance researchers’ understanding of aging, says Andrei Irimia, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. “Prior to this study, we knew that brain anatomy changes with aging and disease. But our ability to grasp this complex interaction was far more modest.”
The study was published on 15 August in Nature Medicine.
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Wrinkles on the brain
Aging can induce not only grey hair, but also changes in brain anatomy that are visible on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, with some areas shrivelling or undergoing structural alterations over time. But these transformations are subtle. “The human eye is not able to perceive patterns of systematic brain changes” associated with this decline, says Christos Davatzikos, a biomedical-imaging specialist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and an author of the paper.
Previous studies have shown that machine-learning methods can extract the subtle fingerprints of aging from MRI data. But these studies were often…
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