A brain MRI (an artificially colored image) can detail the risk of memory loss and other cognitive difficulties, according to an article published today in Nature Aging. When asked how fast does your brain age?, conventional scans reveal the rate, according to the article based on a study of more than 50,000 brain scans.
The images hold clues about the risk of dementia and various age-related diseases, and key characteristics such as the thickness of the cerebral cortex (the region that controls language and thought) and the volume of gray matter it contains play a role here.
These and other characteristics can predict the rate at which a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as their risk of frailty, illness, and death, the Nature Aging article indicates.
Aging “clocks”
Along these lines, Madhi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies aging at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts, USA, says that although it is too early to use the new results in clinical evaluation of people, the test offers advantages over previously reported aging “clocks.”
These are generally based on blood tests that aim to measure how quickly a person ages, explains Moqri, who was not part of the study and is quoted by Nature Aging.
Unique and direct information
The expert asserts that “imaging offers unique and direct information about the structural aging of the brain, providing insights that molecular or blood-based biomarkers alone cannot capture.”
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