Experts have reported a way of estimating an individual’s ‘brain age’ in order to predict risk of age-associated disease and disability.
"Ageing does not affect people uniformly," say the researchers in Molecular Psychiatry yesterday (25 April).
"Hence, markers of the underlying biological ageing process are needed to help identify people at increased risk of age-associated physical and cognitive impairments and ultimately, death."
So the team combined a biomarker of ‘brain-predicted age’ using machine-learning data analysis, developed on neuroimaging results from 2,001 healthy people and tested on 669 older adults in Scotland.
In this way they identified links between age-associated functional measures and mortality. Specifically, having an older brain-predicted age was associated with weaker grip strength, poorer lung function, slower walking speed, as well as an increased mortality risk.
Once this measure of brain-predicted age was combined with DNA-methylation-predicted age, it gave an even more accurate mortality risk prediction, the team reports.
"This indicates that neuroimaging and epigenetics measures of ageing can provide complementary data regarding health outcomes," they write. "Our study introduces a clinically-relevant neuroimaging ageing biomarker and demonstrates that combining distinct measurements of biological ageing further helps to determine risk of age-related deterioration and death."
Researcher Dr James Cole of Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues hope that this technique might one day be used as a screening tool, highlighting people at risk of cognitive decline and death before the age of 80.
Dr Cole said: "Our approach uses the discrepancy between chronological age and what we call brain-predicted age as a marker of age-related atrophy in the brain. If your brain is predicted to be older than your real age than that reflects something negative may be happening."
Cole, J. et al. Brain age predicts mortality. Molecular Psychiatry 25 April 2017; doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.62
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