Good news! This appears to be a faster version of an existing biomarker of the pace of aging.
"Telltale features in standard brain images can reveal how quickly a person is ageing. In a study of more than 50,000 brain scans, researchers found that features such as the thickness of the cerebral cortex — a region responsible for language and memory — can predict how quickly a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age.
The study is part of efforts to develop ‘clocks’ that determine a person’s biological age. “Imaging offers unique, direct insights into the brain’s structural ageing, providing information that blood-based or molecular biomarkers alone can’t capture,”..."
"... Pivotal features include the thickness of the cerebral cortex — a region that controls language and thinking — and the volume of grey matter that it contains. These and other characteristics can predict how quickly a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as their risk of frailty, disease and death. ..."
From the abstract:
"To understand how aging affects functional decline and increases disease risk, it is necessary to develop measures of how fast a person is aging. Using data from the Dunedin Study, we introduce an accurate and reliable measure for the rate of longitudinal aging derived from cross-sectional brain magnetic resonance imaging, that is, the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging (DunedinPACNI).
Exporting this measure to the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, UK Biobank and BrainLat datasets revealed that faster DunedinPACNI predicted cognitive impairment, accelerated brain atrophy and conversion to diagnosed dementia.
Faster DunedinPACNI also predicted physical frailty, poor health, future chronic diseases and mortality in older adults.
When compared to brain age gap, DunedinPACNI was similarly or more strongly related to clinical outcomes. DunedinPACNI is a next-generation brain magnetic resonance imaging biomarker that can help researchers explore aging effects on health outcomes and evaluate the effectiveness of antiaging strategies."
How fast are you ageing? Ordinary brain scans reveal the pace "Images hold clues to risk of dementia and various age-related diseases."
DunedinPACNI estimates the longitudinal Pace of Aging from a single brain image to track health and disease (open access)
Fig. 1: Schematic overview of the study methods.
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