Cross-Sectional Brain Age Assessments Are Limited in Predicting Future Brain Change

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Radiology
• Gerontology

Background:

• Brain age (BA) is an imaging marker proposed to indicate brain health and aging.
• Its ability to reflect past, present, and future brain changes across tissues is debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether brain age (BA) derived from multimodal MRI data reflects the rate of brain aging.
• To examine the relationship between BA and anatomical brain changes over time.

Main Methods:

• Utilized multimodal MRI data from 39,325 UK Biobank participants (aged 44-82 years).
• Included 2,520 follow-up assessments over 1.12-6.90 years.
• Analyzed cross-sectional and longitudinal changes in BA and anatomical features.

Main Results:

• Found insufficient evidence that BA accurately tracks the rate of brain aging.
• Observed that modality-specific brain ages reflect the current state of the brain.
• Diffusion and multimodal MRI brain ages show potential as cross-sectional markers.

Conclusions:

• Brain age is not a reliable indicator of the rate of brain aging.
• Diffusion and multimodal MRI brain age are potentially valuable for assessing current brain health.