MRI scans that ‘predict your brain age’ could spot who’s at risk of early death, doctors hope
The scan measures the levels of brain tissue a person has to determine if their brain is operating at older or younger than their actual age
DOCTORS could soon determine if you are at risk of dying young using an MRI scan.
The scans could also be used to spot those who are at risk of poor health, new research has found.
A team of neuroscientists in London have trained computers to test the 'brain age' of patients based on the volume of their brain tissue.
The new test measures the overall loss of grey and white matter - a hallmark of the brain's ageing process.
Grey matter is a major part of the body's central nervous system, which helps send messages along the nerves from the brain to the rest of the body.
Meanwhile white matter is the tissue that connects the grey matter to different areas of the brain.
The new scans are not yet ready for clinical trials, the researchers stressed.
But they hope they could one day be used as a tool to identify those at risk of cognitive decline and dying before the age of 80.
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When tested on a group of older adults in Scotland, the researchers found that the greater the difference between a person's 'brain age' and actual age the higher their risk of poor mental and physical health.
Dr James Cole, lead author and research associate in the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, said: "We've come up with a way of predicting someone's brain age based on an MRI scan of their brain.
"Our approach uses 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."
To test their idea Dr Cole looked at more than 2,000 MRI scans of healthy people's brains.
After fine-tuning the technology it was then applied to scans of 669 people from the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, a well-studied group of adults all born in 1936 who had undergone MRI scans at age 73.
The scans were given a score measuring their predicted brain age.
Those with a brain older than their actual age were given a worse score on standard physical measures for healthy ageing, including grip strength, lung capacity and walking speed.
And they discovered men were more likely to have an older brain than women, with scans showing a discrepancy of eight years for men and two years for women.
If your brain is predicted to be older than your real age than that reflects something negative may be happening
Dr James Cole
Dr Cole added: "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.
"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.
"People use the 'age' of an organ all the time to talk about health.
"Smokers are said to have lungs that are 20 years older than they should be, you can even answer online questionnaires about exercise and diet and get a 'heart age'.
"This technique could eventually be like that."
The study, conducted with peers from the University of Edinburgh, were published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
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