Heidi Ledford in Nature:
Telltale features visible in standard brain images can reveal how quickly a person is ageing, a study of more than 50,000 brain scans has shown1.
Pivotal features include the thickness of the cerebral cortex — a region that controls language and thinking — and the volume of grey matter that the cerebral cortex contains. These and other characteristics can predict the rate at which a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as their risk of frailty, disease and death. Although it’s too soon to use the new results to assess people in the clinic, the test provides advantages over previously reported ageing ‘clocks’ — typically based on blood tests — that purport to measure how fast a person is ageing, says Madhi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies ageing at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
More here.
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