Researchers at the Imperial College London are predicting a person's brain age to determine if they are at risk of early death.
The team of neuroscientists at Imperial College London combined
magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, with a machine learning algorithm to
train computers to give a predicted brain age for people based on their
volume of brain tissue.
"We've come up with a way of predicting someone's brain age based on
an MRI scan of their brain," Dr. James Cole, a research associate in the
Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, said in a press
release. "Our approach used the discrepancy between their chronological
age and what we call their 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."
The work was part of a worldwide effort by scientists to find reliable biomarkers that can be used to measure age.
The technique measures brain volume and uses machine learning to
estimate the overall loss of white and grey matter, which is a key
component in the aging process in the brain.
Cole and his team then tested the technique on publicly available
datasets of MRI scans of more than 2,000 healthy people's brains,
resulting in maps that could accurately predict a person's age.
Researchers tested the technique on a population of 669 older adults
over age 70 or older in Scotland who were part of the Lothian Birth
Cohort 1936.
The study found that the greater the difference between a person's
brain age and their actual age, the higher their risk of poor mental and
physical health and early death. Participants whose brain age was older
than their chronological age performed worse on standard physical tests
of healthy aging including lung capacity, walking speed and grip
strength.
Participants with older brains were statistically more likely to die
before age 80, and had an average discrepancy between brain age and
chronological age of eight years for males and two years for females.
"In the long run it would be great if we could do this accurately
enough so that we could do it at an individual level," Cole said.
"Someone could go to their doctor, have a brain scan and the doctor
could say 'your brain is 10 years older than it should be,' and
potentially advise them to change their diet or lifestyle or to start a
course of treatment. However, at the moment, it's not sufficiently
accurate to be used at that sort of individual level."
The study was published in Molecular Psychiatry.
Source: UPI When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)
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