Latest news with #DunedinPACNI
Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
A Single Brain Scan Halfway Through Your Life Can Reveal How Fast You're Aging
The rate at which our bodies age and wear down doesn't necessarily match our actual age, and the differences can help predict lifespan and disease risk. Now, researchers have developed a new tool for assessing biological age from a single brain scan taken halfway through our lives. The tool, put together by an international team of scientists, is based on a dataset of 1,037 people born in Dunedin in New Zealand in 1972 and 1973. The health of these individuals has been carefully tracked over time, giving scientists a useful long-term database of stats that reflect the body's actual age – not how many birthdays have passed. Here, the researchers used those stats to assess biological aging, and train a tool they've called DunedinPACNI – Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging. That sums up its function, which is to match aging to markers in the brain. Related: Dementia Breakthrough: Brain Scans Predict Disease Up to 9 Years Early The system has the potential to quickly assess the body's age to a good degree of accuracy, and from there health and disease risks, including the chances of dementia. Rather than needing multiple tests over time, just a single brain scan is required. "What's really cool about this is that we've captured how fast people are aging using data collected in midlife," says neuroscientist Ahmad Hariri from Duke University in North Carolina. "And it's helping us predict diagnosis of dementia among people who are much older." DunedinPACNI takes in 99 key brain measurements to make its assessment, including the thickness of the cerebral cortex – which affects language and thinking – and the volume of gray matter in the brain. Once the researchers had developed DunedinPACNI, they tested it on a variety of data from other health research projects, covering more than 50,000 people in total. It was shown to work well at estimating biological age, and at predicting future health problems such as cognitive impairment and heart attacks. It's not a tool that offers perfect accuracy each time, but it scores as well as or better than current biological age assessment methods, the researchers say. What's more, it was shown to be useful across different demographic and socioeconomic groups. "The link between aging of the brain and body is pretty compelling," says Hariri. "It seems to be capturing something that is reflected in all brains." If we know that someone's body is aging faster than their chronological age, it means measures can be taken to reduce the risk of health problems – years or even decades before those health problems might otherwise become evident. Changes in diet or exercise at that point could make a major difference. The researchers are particularly interested in predicting the risk of the various types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. As people live longer across the world, rates of dementia are increasing, and the best way to tackle the condition could be to stop it developing in the first place. "We really think of it as hopefully being a key new tool in forecasting and predicting risk for diseases, especially Alzheimer's and related dementias, and also perhaps gaining a better foothold on progression of disease," says Hariri. The research has been published in Nature Aging. Related News Surgeons Resuscitate 'Dead' Heart in Life-Saving Organ Transplant to Baby Huge Study Reveals 2 Vaccines That Appear to Reduce Dementia Risk One Dietary Supplement Shown to Reduce Aggression by Up to 28% Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Brain scans could reveal your true biological age
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Scientists can now judge how fast your whole body is aging based on a single snapshot of your brain, researchers claim in a new study. The scientists, who published their findings July 1 in the journal Nature Aging, have developed a benchmark of biological aging based on brain MRIs. The team says the tool can predict an individual's future risk of cognitive impairment and dementia, chronic conditions like heart disease, physical frailty and early death. "Our paper presents a new way of measuring how fast a person is aging at any given moment using the information available in a single brain MRI," said first author Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. "Faster aging increases our risk for many diseases including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and dementia," he told Live Science in an email. Hariri and colleagues used data from the Dunedin Study, which followed 1,037 people from Dunedin, New Zealand, from birth to middle age. These participants, born in 1972 and 1973, periodically received 19 assessments to check the function of their heart, brain, liver, kidneys and more. To develop their tool, the team analyzed the brain MRIs taken from this cohort at age 45 and ran the data about brain structure — the volume and thickness of various brain regions and the ratio of white to gray matter — through a machine learning algorithm. They compared the processed brain data to other data collected from the participants at the same time, such as tests of physical and cognitive decline, subjective health statuses, and signs of facial aging, like wrinkles. They asserted that bigger declines in those areas were tied to a faster pace of aging, overall, and then correlated features of the brain data to those metrics. They called their resulting model "Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from Neuroimaging," or DunedinPACNI. Related: Epigenetics linked to the maximum life spans of mammals Previously, the team created a similar tool called Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from the Epigenome (DunedinPACE). That metric looked at methylation — chemical tags that attach to DNA molecules — in blood samples to estimate people's pace of aging. Methylation is a type of "epigenetic change," meaning it alters genes activity without changing DNA's underlying code. "[DunedinPACE] has been widely adopted by studies with available epigenetic data," Hariri said. "DunedinPACNI now allows studies without epigenetic data but with brain MRI to measure accelerated aging." The researchers directly compared DunedinPACNI to DunedinPACE, finding that they generated similar results. To see if their new tool could be useful beyond Dunedin, the team used it to estimate the pace of aging using MRIs in other datasets: 42,000 MRIs from the U.K. Biobank; over 1,700 MRIs from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI); and 369 from the BrainLat set, which includes data from five South American countries. "Making sure our findings generalize across datasets and demographic groups is a big priority for brain imaging research," study co-author Ethan Whitman, a doctoral student at Duke, told Live Science in an email. They found that DunedinPACNI could also estimate the rate of aging in these other cohorts, and that it did so as accurately as other measures used in the past. The U.K. Biobank and ADNI also include measures of specific health effects of aging, including tests of physical frailty, like grip strength and walking speed, as well as rates of heart attack, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and death from all causes within the cohorts. Using these additional measures, the team was able to link faster aging rates, as determined with DunedinPACNI, with increased risks of heart attack, stroke, COPD and death. Hariri believes DunedinPACNI has the potential to be widely adopted because the type of MRIs it uses are routinely collected. Now it's a matter of crunching the data and determining standards of what reflects "healthy" and "poor" aging, he said. "The fact that it worked well with the BrainLat data is a big win for the investigators because it supports the generalizability of the model,' said Dr. Dan Henderson, a primary care physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who was not involved with the study. "It would still be worth looking at other data sets where genetic and other factors might be different in important ways," he added. RELATED STORIES —Biological aging may not be driven by what we thought —Taurine is 'not a reliable biomarker of anything yet': Study challenges hype over 'anti-aging' supplement —Doctors say AI model can predict 'biological age' from a selfie — and want to use it to guide cancer treatment Henderson said he could see DunedinPACNI eventually being used in place of conventional health measures to fine-tune medical interventions for individual patients. Whitman also sees broad implications for the research. Assuming it's validated for use by doctors, he thinks it could help patients prepare for age-related health issues before they manifest."We were really amazed that our tool was able to predict disease risk before symptoms had started," Whitman told Live Science in an email. "We think this is a great example of why it's important to study aging in general, but especially in younger, healthy people. If you only study people after they have gotten sick, you're missing a lot of the story." Brain quiz: Test your knowledge of the most complex organ in the body
Medscape
11-07-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Single Brain MRI Reveals Accelerated Aging, Dementia Risk
A novel brain-based 'aging' clock can accurately and reliably estimate how quickly an individual is biologically aging from a single MRI scan, offering a potential tool to help clinicians predict the risk for dementia, mild cognitive impairment, and other chronic diseases, a new study showed. Investigators developed the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging (DunedinPACNI) to estimate an individual's pace of aging based on brain MRI features such as cortical thickness, surface area, gray matter volume, gray-to-white matter contrast, subcortical volumes, and ventricular sizes. In a series of studies with more than 50,000 brain MRI scans from people aged 22-98 years across multiple datasets, those whose biological age outpaced their chronological age not only had poorer cognition, faster hippocampal atrophy, and greater dementia risk but also worse general health, including greater frailty, poorer self-reported health, and greater risk for chronic disease and premature death. While more research on the new tool is needed, investigators said they expect it will be ready for use in clinical practice in a few years. 'Perhaps our boldest expectation is for DunedinPACNI to become part of routine clinical care across the lifespan as an index of faster aging that can help physicians identify patients at risk for later poor health well before symptoms appear and when prevention efforts can be most effective,' Ahmad R. Hariri, PhD, professor of psychology and neuroscience and director, Laboratory of Neurogenetics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, told Medscape Medical News . The study was published online on July 1 in Nature Aging . Blood-Based Epigenetic Clock The DunedinPACE-NI tool builds on earlier research from a long-term study that has followed more than 1000 individuals born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1972-1973. The researchers initially used data from this study to develop DunedinPACE, a blood-based epigenetic clock that uses DNA methylation to estimate the rate of aging. While DunedinPACE has shown strong associations with morbidity, brain aging, and more. Itsy, its application is limited to studies where blood samples are available, the researchers noted. To overcome this limitation, they developed DunedinPACNI, which uses data from a single standard T1-weighted MRI scan to estimate an individual's longitudinal pace of aging — a composite index reflecting physiological decline across cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, renal, and other systems. The researchers trained DunedinPACNI on MRI data from 860 participants in the Dunedin Study, all scanned at age 45. The model incorporated 315 structural brain features. The algorithm for DunedinPACNI is publicly available to the research community. Applying this measure to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), UK Biobank and BrainLat datasets showed that faster DunedinPACNI scores predicted cognitive impairment, accelerated brain atrophy, and conversion to diagnosed mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia. For example, in the ADNI sample, individuals deemed to be aging the fastest (top 10%) when they joined the study had a 61% higher risk of progressing to MCI or dementia in the years that followed than average agers. The fast agers also started to have memory problems sooner than those who were found to be aging slower based on DunedinPACNI scores. In the UK Biobank sample, healthy participants with faster DunedinPACNI at baseline were 14% more likely to be diagnosed with chronic age-related diseases later on. The fastest agers had an 18% higher risk of being diagnosed with a chronic age-related disease than average agers. Fast aging was also associated with worse cognitive performance, higher frailty, and poorer self-rated health. Over an average of nearly 10 years of follow-up, those with the fastest DunedinPACNI scores were 41% more likely to die than those who were aging more slowly. DunedinPACNI also reflects social gradients of health inequities. Faster aging scores were observed in individuals with fewer years of formal education or lower income. The measure also had similar predictive power for dementia risk and cognitive impairment among Latin American adults in the BrainLat cohort. 'It seems to be capturing something that is reflected in all brains,' Hariri said in a press release. From Bench to Bedside 'Right now, DunedinPACNI can only tell us if a person is aging faster or slower than others within any given dataset or sample,' Hariri told Medscape Medical News. 'That is, DunedinPACNI is currently a relative measure. It doesn't yet tell us if a person is aging faster or slower than would be expected for any person anywhere in the world who is of the same chronological age. But that is changing quickly.' Investigators need to develop normative reference charts for DunedinPACNI, similar to what they have done for such measures as height, weight, and BMI, Hariri noted. 'It will take time to analyze the tens of thousands of scans collected across the lifespan necessary to develop these norms, but we've already begun to do this. We are confident that reference norms for DunedinPACNI will be ready within the next year and, subsequently, DunedinPACNI can be adopted in clinical practice within a few years,' Hariri said. Immediate applications of DunedinPACNI in the research setting include using it as an outcome measure in randomized clinical trials of interventions to slow down aging and as a biomarker of accelerated aging that can help predict the chances that an older person will convert from normal cognitive functioning to MCI or from MCI to dementia, Hariri explained. DunedinPACNI could also be used in clinical trials of AD interventions. This could be as a surrogate outcome measure in younger people decades before they might develop dementia by showing that an intervention slows down aging, which is itself a major risk factor for dementia, Hariri said. 'In older people, DunedinPACNI may be useful as a screening tool to either reduce heterogeneity in the sample by enrolling people all aging at about the same rate or excluding people for are aging faster than others and who may be at increased risk for unintended side effects of treatment including amyloid related imaging abnormalities (ARIAs),' Hariri added.
Fox News
10-07-2025
- Health
- Fox News
AI brain scan tool predicts how fast you are aging
Our bodies change as we get older, and one undesirable result is that we become more vulnerable to age-related issues. Particularly, old age is characterized by a significant physical and mental decline. But why is it that some people thrive in their later years, while others face several health challenges prematurely? It's as if some people age faster than others. To get to the bottom of this, scientists from Duke, Harvard, and the University of Otago have unveiled a game-changing tool called DunedinPACNI. It uses a single AI brain scan to reveal how fast a person is biologically aging. It's changing the way we track aging and the long-term health risks associated with it. Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide - free when you join my The DunedinPACNI was named after the Dunedin Study, which followed over 1,000 people since their birth in the 1970s. Researchers analyzed decades of data, looking at factors like blood pressure, BMI, cholesterol, glucose, kidney function, and even dental health, to come up with a unique "aging score" for each participant. The new MRI-based AI brain scan can predict this score with surprising accuracy from a scan taken at age 45. Participants whose aging scores were faster showed early signs of memory-related brain changes, such as shrinkage of the hippocampus. Follow-up studies of people aged between 52 and 89 showed that those aging rapidly were 60% more likely to develop dementia, 18% more likely to be diagnosed with chronic illnesses, and 40% more likely to die within the same period compared to those who were aging at a slower pace. This data shows that brain aging and overall physical decline are closely linked. The team believes DunedinPACNI could change the landscape of preventive medicine. If it were possible to spot health risks early through an AI brain scan, at-risk individuals might be motivated to make healthier lifestyle changes (e.g., diet, exercise, and stress management). It could also help healthcare providers evaluate the effectiveness of treatment and slow the progression of age-related diseases. The DunedinPACNI is a great tool that offers a non-invasive and powerful window into biological aging that traditional blood tests never could. A single AI brain scan provides a lifetime of health insights. It comes at a much-needed time as chronic diseases are on the rise. It may just be one of the key ingredients in predicting health outcomes and coming up with personalized wellness strategies. Have you considered advanced tools like MRI scans for preventative healthcare? Let us know by writing us at Sign up for my FREE CyberGuy ReportGet my best tech tips, urgent security alerts, and exclusive deals delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, you'll get instant access to my Ultimate Scam Survival Guide - free when you join my Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
Otago Daily Times
02-07-2025
- Health
- Otago Daily Times
Otago scientists develop tool to estimate dementia risk
By Rowan Quinn of RNZ Dunedin scientists have helped develop an internationally groundbreaking tool that estimates a person's risk of getting dementia and other age-related diseases. It uses a single MRI scan that can be done in mid-life and before someone is showing any signs of the conditions. Otago University scientists worked with Duke and Harvard universities in the United States and have published their findings in the prestigious medical journal Nature Aging this week. Data from Otago's Dunedin Study - which has followed 1037 participants since they were born in 1972 and 1973 - has been critical in the work. That study looked at changes in blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol levels, tooth and gum health and other body functions over 20 years to see how quickly people were ageing. That data was then compared with an MRI taken when the study participants were 45 and a tool - an algorithm known as Dunedin PACNI - was developed that can look at anyone's MRI and estimate how they might age. Dunedin Study director Professor Moana Theodore said study members who had higher or faster PACNI scores were more likely to have poorer health. "And also poorer physical functioning, things like walking and balance, and also poorer cognitive function, things like poorer memory even though they were, at that stage in their mid 40s," she said. The new tool was then tested out on 50,000 brain scans from data on people aged 50-89 in other parts of the world. "In those studies of older people we were able to identify things like the development of chronic disease, so, an increased likelihood of heart attacks or strokes, an increased risk of being diagnosed with dementia over time and even an increased mortality," she said. The study found those who were ageing faster had more shrinkage in the hippocampus region of the brain and performed worse on cognitive tests. Professor Theodore said the tool could help change outcomes for people. "If we can predict ageing, especially in mid-life.... then what we are able to do is prevent, possibly intervene earlier on to stop or slow down age related diseases like dementia for which there is currently no clear treatment," she said She and her team were incredibly proud of the work - and she thanked the Dunedin Study members and their families for their 50 year contribution. "It's wonderful to have a New Zealand study that is at the forefront of international research on ageing and how to support people to age positively and well and how to reduce age related diseases that cause people to have poorer quality of life later in life," she said. DunedinPACNI will be freely available for scientists around the world to use to further their own work on ageing.
