Brain age predicts mortality
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Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Age-associated disease and disability are placing a growing burden on society. However, ageing does not affect people uniformly. 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. Here, we present such a biomarker, ‘brain-predicted age’, derived using structural neuroimaging. Brain-predicted age was calculated using machine-learning analysis, trained on neuroimaging data from a large healthy reference sample (N = 2001), then tested in the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936 (N = 669), to determine relationships with age-associated functional measures and mortality. Having a brain-predicted age indicative of an older-appearing brain was associated with: weaker grip strength, poorer lung function, slower walking speed, lower fluid intelligence, higher allostatic load and increased mortality risk. Furthermore, while combining brain-predicted age with grey matter and cerebrospinal fluid volumes (themselves strong predictors) not did improve mortality risk prediction, the combination of brain-predicted age and DNA-methylation-predicted age did. This indicates that neuroimaging and epigenetics measures of ageing can provide complementary data regarding health outcomes. 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.
Date Issued
2017-04-25
Date Acceptance
2017-02-17
Citation
Molecular Psychiatry, 2017, 23, pp.1385-1392
ISSN
1476-5578
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Start Page
1385
End Page
1392
Journal / Book Title
Molecular Psychiatry
Volume
23
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/
License URL
Sponsor
Commission of the European Communities
National Institute for Health Research
Grant Number
305522
NIHR-RP-011-048
Subjects
11 Medical And Health Sciences
06 Biological Sciences
17 Psychology And Cognitive Sciences
Psychiatry
Publication Status
Published