Cross-sectional brain age assessments are limited in predicting future brain change

2024/09/15 by Max Korbmacher, Didac Vidal‐Piñeiro, Mengyun Wang +7 · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Medicine · Neuroscience · #Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications #Functional Brain Connectivity Studies #Health, Environment, Cognitive Aging

paper · doi:10.1101/2024.09.11.612523

openalex publication_date 2024/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22

Abstract

ABSTRACT The concept of brain age (BA) describes an integrative imaging marker of brain health, often suggested to reflect ageing processes. However, the degree to which cross-sectional MRI features, including BA, reflect past, ongoing and future brain changes across different tissue types from macro-to microstructure remains controversial (Vidal-Pineiro et al. 2021). Here, we advance these findings by using multimodal imaging data of 39, 325 UK Biobank participants, aged 44 − 82 years at baseline and 2, 520 follow-ups within 1.12 − 6.90 years. In concordance with the original findings, we find insufficient evidence that BA reflects the rate of brain ageing. However, modality-specific differences in brain ages reflected the state of the brain, highlighting diffusion and multimodal MRI brain age as potentially useful cross-sectional markers.

Citations

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Discussions

• This is another study showing limited utility of current brain age estimates as a biomarker for biological aging. We came to similar conclusions in an earlier study doi.org/10.1101/2024... [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]

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