Health Capsule

From a biological perspective, individuals do not all age at the same pace. The speed at which you age can influence your overall health and the likelihood of developing certain diseases. Understanding how quickly you age could provide an opportunity to work with your healthcare provider to potentially delay aging. Recently, researchers have created a method to estimate aging progress using a single brain scan.

This team had previously explored measuring biological aging through blood analysis. They monitored the health of over 1,000 individuals from birth to the age of 45, evaluating 19 key indicators of health, including cardiovascular performance, metabolic processes, and immune system markers. This led to the development of a metric called the Pace of Aging, which reflects the gradual decline in body functions over time.

In addition, most of the people involved in the study had MRI brain scans at age 45. The researchers took the data from these scans and combined it with the previous health aging metrics to craft a new measurement based solely on brain imaging. This new assessment, termed DunedinPACNI, was then validated using information from thousands of other participants in separate studies.

The DunedinPACNI measurement proved reliable in forecasting how quickly a person's cognitive abilities, such as thinking and memory, might decline with age. It also helped determine a person's likelihood of experiencing future health issues or early death.

“We’ve managed to quantify the speed of aging using midlife data, and it’s providing insight into who might develop conditions like dementia later in life,” says Dr. Ahmad Hariri from Duke University. “We believe this approach could become an important method for assessing disease risk in the future.”