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Five ways the brain can age: 50,000 scans reveal possible patterns of damage

Results raise hopes that methods could be developed to detect the earliest stages of neurodegenerative disease.
  1. Michael Eisenstein

    1. Michael Eisenstein is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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Coloured MRI scan of a human head and brain, with the person facing to the left

Some parts of the brain tend to atrophy and deform in concert with other regions.Credit: Zephyr/SPL

An analysis of almost 50,000 brain scans1 has revealed five distinct patterns of brain atrophy associated with ageing and neurodegenerative disease. The analysis has also linked the patterns to lifestyle factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as to genetic and blood-based markers associated with health status and disease risk.

The work is a “methodological tour de force” that could greatly advance researchers’ understanding of ageing, says Andrei Irimia, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. “Prior to this study, we knew that brain anatomy changes with ageing and disease. But our ability to grasp this complex interaction was far more modest.”

The study was published on 15 August in Nature Medicine.

Wrinkles on the brain

Ageing can induce not only grey hair, but also changes in brain anatomy that are visible on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, with some areas shrivelling or undergoing structural alterations over time. But these transformations are subtle. “The human eye is not able to perceive patterns of systematic brain changes” associated with this decline, says Christos Davatzikos, a biomedical-imaging specialist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and an author of the paper.

Previous studies have shown that machine-learning methods can extract the subtle fingerprints of ageing from MRI data. But these studies were often limited in scope and most included data from a relatively small number of people.

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Nature 632, 961 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02692-z

References

  1. Yang, Z. et al. Nature Med. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03144-x (2024).

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