Brain scans could reveal your true biological age
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
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
JWST finds unusual black hole in the center of the Infinity Galaxy: 'How can we make sense of this?'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an oddball galaxy, dubbed the Infinity Galaxy, that could be host to a "direct collapse black hole." That is, a black hole originally created directly from a vast cloud of collapsing gas and dust rather than a dying star. The Infinity Galaxy gets its name from the fact that its shape resembles an infinity symbol (a sideways 8) with two red lobes or "nuclei." This shape is thought to have arisen because the Infinity Galaxy was formed as two disk galaxies engaged in a head-on collision. What makes this highly unusual is the fact that this black hole sits between the two colliding galaxies in a vast cloud of gas, rather than in either respective nucleus. From its perch between these galaxies, the black hole now feeds greedily on that gas, but researchers think that same cloud also once birthed it. That would make this the first observational evidence of the direct collapse pathway of black hole birth. The researchers behind these findings uncovered the Infinity Galaxy while examining images from the JWST's 255-hour treasury COSMOS-Web survey. In addition to the suspected direct collapse black hole that sits between the colliding galaxies, the team found that each nucleus of those galaxies also contains a supermassive black hole! "Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in," team leader and Yale University researcher Pieter van Dokkum said in a statement. "The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei but in the middle. "We asked ourselves: How can we make sense of this?" van Dokkum explained that finding a black hole not in the nucleus of a massive galaxy isn't, in itself, unusual. What is strange is the question of how that black hole got there. "It likely didn't just arrive there, but instead it formed there," van Dokkum said. "And pretty recently. In other words, we think we're witnessing the birth of a supermassive black hole – something that has never been seen before." This discovery could solve an intriguing mystery regarding the observation of supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Black holes could skip stellar deaths and supernovas Since it began operating three years ago, the JWST has delivered something of a conundrum to cosmologists; observations that show supermassive black holes seem common as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang. That's a problem because it was previously proposed that supermassive black holes form through successive mergers of smaller black holes. However, beginning this process with so-called stellar-mass black holes would require waiting for the first generation of stars to form, live their lives, then collapse in supernova explosions. The resulting black holes would have to undergo a series of mergers and periods of intense feeding upon interstellar gas and dust. This process would take at least a billion years to "grow" a black hole to supermassive status. Thus, seeing a multitude of supermassive black holes before the universe was 1 billion years old is problematic. That is, unless these bodies got a head start by skipping the stellar life and birth stage of this process. "How supermassive black holes formed is a long-standing question. There are two main theories, called 'light seeds' and 'heavy seeds.' In the light seed theory, you start with small black holes formed when a star's core collapses and the star explodes as a supernova," van Dokkum explained. "That might result in a black hole weighing up to about 1,000 suns. You form a lot of them in a small space, and they merge over time to become a much more massive black hole." As mentioned above, the problem with that is the time this process would take and the JWST's discovery of incredibly massive black holes at early stages of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe. Black holes could have heavy seeds Alternatively, the heavy seed theory sees supermassive black hole growth kickstarted with a much larger black hole, maybe up to one million times the mass of the sun. This forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud. "You immediately form a giant black hole, so it's much quicker. However, the problem with forming a black hole out of a gas cloud is that gas clouds like to form stars as they collapse rather than a black hole, so you have to find some way of preventing that. It's not clear that this direct-collapse process could work in practice," van Dokkum said. "By looking at the data from the Infinity Galaxy, we think we've pieced together a story of how this could have happened here." The researchers suggest that as the two disk galaxies collided, a ring structure of stars, visible in the JWST image, was formed. During this collision, gas within these two galaxies would have been shocked and compressed. They think this compression may have been so extreme that it formed a "dense knot" in the gas, which then collapsed into a black hole. As van Dokkum explained, there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence for this formation channel for the black hole in the Infinity Galaxy. "We observe a large swath of ionized gas, specifically hydrogen that has been stripped of its electrons, that's right in the middle between the two nuclei, surrounding the supermassive black hole," he continued. "We also know that the black hole is actively growing – we see evidence of that in X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio from the Very Large Array. Nevertheless, the question is, did it form there?" There are two possible explanations that don't involve a direct collapse black hole forming at the intersection of these merged galaxies. "First, it could be a runaway black hole that got ejected from a galaxy and just happens to be passing through," van Dokkum said. "Second, it could be a black hole at the center of a third galaxy in the same location on the sky. If it were in a third galaxy, we would expect to see the surrounding galaxy unless it were a faint dwarf galaxy. However, dwarf galaxies don't tend to host giant black holes. "If the black hole were a runaway, or if it were in an unrelated galaxy, we would expect it to have a very different velocity from the gas in the Infinity Galaxy." To test this, the team intends to measure the velocity of the gas and the velocity of the black hole and compare them. Should those velocities be close, within around 30 miles per second (50 kilometers per second), then van Dokkum asserts that it will be hard to argue that the black hole is not formed from that gas. Related Stories: —The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its 1st exoplanet and snapped its picture (image) —Astronomers discover origins of mysterious double hot Jupiter exoplanets: 'It is a dance of sorts' —NASA exoplanet-hunting spacecraft and citizen scientists discover a cool new alien world "Our preliminary results are exciting. First, the presence of an extended distribution of ionized gas between the two nuclei is confirmed. Second, the black hole is beautifully in the middle of the velocity distribution of this surrounding gas, as expected if it formed there. This is the key result that we were after!" van Dokkum continued. "Third, as an unexpected bonus, it turns out that both galaxy nuclei also have an active supermassive black hole." Though the team can't say definitively that they discovered a direct collapse black hole, they can state with confidence that this JWST data strengthens the case for this being a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the counter-explanations to the direct collapse pathway. "This system has three confirmed active black holes: two very massive ones in both of the galaxy nuclei, and the one in between them that might have formed there," van Dokkum said. "We will continue to pore through the data and investigate these possibilities." Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Astrophotographer captures galactic fireworks near the Seahorse Nebula in eerie deep-space photo
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astrophotographer Greg Meyer has captured a spectacular image of the Fireworks Galaxy (NGC 6946) shining close to the dark shape of the Seahorse Nebula. The majestic spiral arms of the Fireworks Galaxy can be found to the lower right of Meyer's cosmic vista, surrounded by the foreground clouds of a dusty molecular cloud located within the Milky Way. The Fireworks Galaxy's nickname stems from the 10 observable supernovas seen brightening its expanse over the past century; for comparison, our galaxy is only expected to manifest one or maybe two such events over the same period of time. Lurking to the left of the Fireworks Galaxy is the star-forming region Barnard 150 — an enormous cloud of interstellar dust also known as the Seahorse Nebula, due to its striking resemblance to the tiny sea creature. The 'Ghost Bush' open star cluster is also visible to the upper right of the Fireworks galaxy, twinkling with the light of countless gravitationally bound stellar bodies. Meyer chose to frame all three objects in a single shot to create a breathtaking deep space vista. "I don't usually shoot galaxies with a telescope of just 400mm, but showing it in perspective to other objects maybe makes it more interesting as a wider shot," said Meyer in an email to As is often the case with astrophotography, the celestial objects captured in Meyer's portrait aren't anywhere near as close to one another as they appear. For example, the Seahorse Nebula orbits within the Milky Way at a distance of 1,200 light-years from Earth, while the Ghost Bush open cluster lies beyond, an impressive 5,600 light-years from our Blue Marble. The Fireworks Galaxy meanwhile is a staggering 22 million light-years from our planet. TOP TELESCOPE PICK Want to see the Seahorse Nebula? The Celestron NexStar 8SE is ideal for beginners wanting quality, reliable and quick views of celestial objects. For a more in-depth look at our Celestron NexStar 8SE review. The light that created this stunning cosmic vista was captured in the pristine skies above northern Arizona over the course of several nights in June earlier this year. Over 17 hours were spent imaging the deep sky objects with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 80mm telescope with a Player One Poseidon M pro astrophotography camera, using a range of filters and peripherals. The data was then post processed using Adobe editing software and Pixinsight. Astrophotographers looking to upgrade their gear should read our guide to the best cameras for capturing the night sky in 2025. We also have a roundup of the top lenses for astrophotography if you're looking for new glass. Editor's Note: If you would like to share your astrophotography with readers, then please send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Largest known Martian meteorite on Earth sells for $5.3 million at auction
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The largest known Martian meteorite has just been sold at auction for $5.29 million, selling well over the asking price of $2 million to $4 million. The hefty chunk of the Red Planet could help us learn more about our cosmic neighbor — if it's allowed to be properly studied. The meteorite, dubbed Northwest Africa (NWA) 16788, is around twice the size of a basketball and weighs 54 pounds (24.5 kilograms), making it "the largest known piece of Mars ever found on Earth," according to Sotheby's — the auction house responsible for selling the space rock. It is around 70% larger than the previous largest known Martian meteorite, and is described as having a "deep red hue" and a "glassy crust," according to Sotheby's. An anonymous meteorite hunter recovered NWA 16788 from part of the Sahara desert in Niger in November 2023. The space rock was known to scientists before now but has not been studied in detail, meaning it is currently unclear how old the space rock is, according to a 2024 study. "NWA 16788 is a geological time capsule from another world," Sotheby's representatives wrote. "With fewer than 400 Martian meteorites ever recorded, and most no larger than a pebble, this specimen offers the biggest tangible connection to a planet that has captivated humanity for centuries." Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there The meteorite was sold at a natural history-themed auction held at Sotheby's New York auction house on Wednesday (July 16), along with more than 100 other lots, which included dinosaur fossils, megalodon teeth, Neanderthal tools, rare minerals, a piece of "fossilized lightning" and several other meteorites. Sold at the same auction was the mounted skeleton of a juvenile ceratosaurus, a theropod dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic period. The skeleton sold for $30.5 million, making it the third most-expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction. The most expensive fossil ever sold was a stegosaurus skeleton named "Apex," which sold for $44.6 million in July 2024. What can we learn from Martian meteorites? Martian meteorites are chunks of the Red Planet that were ejected into space as asteroids and comets smashed into the alien world. Most of these fragments have likely drifted in space for millions, if not billions, of years before eventually falling to Earth. While several Mars rovers have examined rocks on the Red Planet, these robots haven't returned any to Earth so far, and this is unlikely to change due to NASA's recent cancellation of the Mars Sample Return mission, meaning meteorites like NWA 16788 are currently the only way of directly studying Mars' origins on Earth. (A planned Chinese mission could bring Mars samples back to Earth no sooner than 2031.) Martian meteorites on Earth have already led to multiple discoveries: For example, in 2023, researchers discovered a "huge diversity" of organic compounds hiding in a rock that was recovered from Morocco; and in 2024, experts uncovered evidence of ancient water on Mars in a rediscovered meteorite found in a university collection. RELATED STORIES —Single enormous object left 2 billion craters on Mars, scientists discover —A Martian meteorite is going home, in NASA's Perseverance mission launch —Massive Martian meteor impact was largest ever recorded in solar system Researchers have also traced back the likely origins of more than 200 Martian meteorites and found that they can be linked to just five different impact sites on Mars, hinting that the space rocks can be used to study specific Mars locations. Whether or not researchers can learn more about the Red Planet from NWA 16788 depends on whether its new owner allows it to be studied by scientists. Solve the daily Crossword
