Latest news with #AhmadHariri
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
National Geographic
16-07-2025
- Health
- National Geographic
Your brain could be 'older' than your age—and it's easier than ever to find out
Two groundbreaking studies show that measuring how fast your brain is aging could transform how we predict and prevent disease—even before symptoms appear. Illustration by OsakaWayne Studios, Getty Images Is your brain aging faster than your chronological age? New research shows it could raise your risk of death and dementia significantly—and offers promise for early intervention. Old age comes for everyone, but how fast it happens—and how healthy you remain when it does—can vary dramatically. Groundbreaking new research makes it easier than ever to determine how fast your brain is aging—and shows that having an 'old" brain raises your risk of death by a striking 182 percent over about 15 years compared to people whose brains are aging normally. In the first of two recent studies, Stanford University scientists found that people with biologically younger organs had a significantly reduced risk of developing diseases compared to those with older organs. This was particularly true for the brain: in addition to raising your risk of death, having an older brain increased the risk of dementia threefold. (When does old age begin? Science says later than you might think.) The Stanford research team made these discoveries using a blood test based on protein biomarkers, which helped them estimate the biological age of specific organs in the body—a measure that, unlike your chronological age, captures the true condition of your organs. But they're not the only ones making breakthroughs on this front. In a complementary study, researchers at Duke University and the University of Otago in New Zealand show that a single MRI scan—technology already common in hospitals—can be used to predict biological brain aging with surprising accuracy. Together, these studies could revolutionize how scientists and doctors predict and prevent chronic diseases long before they arise. 'Instead of treating each disease one by one after people get them, we want to approach medicine a completely different way and intervene while people are still young and before age-related diseases have developed,' says Terrie Moffitt, co-author of the Duke/Otago study and a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University School of Medicine. Biological age vs. chronological age Scientists have long distinguished between chronological age—the number of years you've been alive—and biological age. Even the rest of us might notice a difference at high school reunions: one former classmate is training for their fourth triathlon while another is struggling with hip pain and memory issues. It helps to differentiate between biological and chronological age by thinking of a car's odometer reading versus the year the car was made. 'While many people may be driving cars built in 2010, some have put many more miles on their engine than others,' explains Ahmad Hariri, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and a lead author of the Duke/Otago study. (Just one pregnancy can add months to your biological age.) And just as individual car parts wear out differently, so do different organs in the body. 'Biological age indicates the health and state of an organ by reflecting how well it's functioning, how much it's declining, and how likely it is to develop disease,' explains Tony Wyss-Coray, professor of neurology and lead author of the Stanford study. Your skin, for instance, may be biologically younger than your chronological age, while your heart could be aging faster. Each organ's longevity is shaped by a mix of genetics, lifestyle, stress, disease history, and environmental exposures. These factors help explain why some people remain biologically young despite the age on their driver's license while others age prematurely and face higher risks for conditions like dementia, heart disease, and diabetes. To pinpoint biological age, scientists have developed various 'aging clocks' that rely on biomarkers—measurable signs of biological function at the cellular or systemic level. Commonly used biomarkers include DNA methylation (a chemical process that 'tags' parts of your DNA based on exposure or stress) and gene expression. Though each aging clock serves specific purposes, all aim to enhance our understanding of aging. Unlocking how biological age affects your health One major benefit of a well-designed aging clock is revealing why certain organs age faster—and how keeping them young can boost longevity and quality of life. For example, the Stanford study, published July 9 in Nature Medicine, assessed the biological aging of 11 major organ systems—including the brain, heart, and kidneys—and shows clear links between biological age and health outcomes. Specifically, older organs predicted disease while biologically younger ones were protective. To reach these conclusions, Wyss-Coray and his team analyzed more than 3,000 proteins in blood samples from over 45,000 human subjects. Using machine learning, they developed an algorithm with the data to estimate the biological age of each organ system—all from a single blood sample. Each 'organ clock,' as Wyss-Coray calls them, shows how much older or younger an organ is compared to a person's chronological age. "What is fascinating from our research is that people with older organs were shown to be more likely to develop disease in these organs," he explains. For example, the blood protein data showed that an abnormally aged heart predicted higher risk of atrial fibrillation and heart failure; aged lungs were linked to increased COPD risk; and an aged brain dramatically raised the person's likelihood of dementia. In fact, someone with a biologically old brain was roughly 12 times likelier to develop Alzheimer's over the next decade compared to peers with biologically young brains. Conversely, biologically younger brains and hearts were linked to increased longevity. Most striking, the study found that having a "young" brain lowers your risk of death by as much as 40 percent. (How a 102-year-old neurologist keeps his brain sharp.) While the study had limitations—including a primarily white cohort and a limited protein panel—it shows that protein levels, unlike genetic data, can change over time. This opens the door to more personalized medical interventions. If doctors can determine which organs are aging rapidly, they may be able to slow—or even reverse—that decline with targeted treatment. While Stanford's test has been patented and licensed to a biotechnology company in hopes of eventually making it clinically useful, it may be years before it's widely available in hospitals and medical practices. By contrast, the Duke/Otago study uses MRI technology that's already common in many clinical settings. Published July 1 in Nature Aging, the study centers on DunedinPACNI—an algorithm-based biomarker the team developed that estimates how quickly a person is aging using standard brain scans called MRIs. 'From a single brain scan, researchers can now estimate how fast you're aging to predict risk for disease,' says Ethan Whitman, a lead author of the study and a clinical psychology Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. The algorithm was developed using more than 50,000 brain MRIs across four datasets and longitudinal data from the famed Dunedin study—a rare cohort of 1,037 individuals born in 1972–1973 in New Zealand and followed for decades after. (How old are you, really? The answer is written on your face.) This aging clock identifies key structural markers—such as cortical thinning, hippocampal shrinkage (changes that have been linked to memory loss and dementia), and other region-specific atrophy patterns—to estimate brain deterioration and cognitive decline. Critically, it does so by isolating biological aging from generational influences. 'Most aging clocks are based on comparisons between young and old people, which can confuse aging with generational exposures like cigarette smoke or leaded gasoline,' explains Whitman. 'Because our study participants were all born in the same year, we could focus on biological aging alone.' Even better, the tool accomplishes all this more quickly and accurately than earlier, less-accessible measures. Such findings could be a game changer for clinical trials and doctors working to detect brain-related diseases earlier. 'DunedinPACNI could be used as a measuring tool in clinical trials or as a screening tool to help doctors identify patients at highest risk of cognitive decline,' Hariri says. Indeed, a sister measure of the algorithm, known as DunedinPACE, has already predicted disease risk in populations across the U.S., U.K., and Latin America—even before symptoms appeared. For now, the tool remains a relative measure—comparing individuals to others in the same dataset—but reference norms are under development for broader use. Together, these studies mark a leap forward for personalized medicine. Though the studies were conducted independently, the two research teams reviewed and praised each other's work. Kristine Yaffe, director of the Center for Population Brain Health at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with either study, also reviewed both studies and calls them high-quality, large-scale, and highly complementary. (How personalized medicine is transforming your health care.) Wyss-Coray describes the Duke/Otago research as 'a very powerful approach to build better models, to gain more biological insight, and to make better predictions of health and disease.' Whitman, in turn, calls the Stanford research 'an excellent study that advances our understanding of aging and how to measure it.' But it's the combination of both approaches that may offer the greatest promise. 'By using both types of measures, you can identify a person's broad risk for chronic diseases and also detect uniquely increased risk for organ-specific diseases—it's like knowing not just how fast your car is going, but which parts might be wearing out the soonest,' explains Hariri. "It's exciting to foresee a future where a simple drop of blood or an MRI scan could help guide personalized interventions (such as lifestyle changes or medications) and track their effectiveness over time,' echoes Wyss-Coray. And that matters because no single measurement 'can tell the full story,' Whitman says. 'The clinicians of the future will need several tools that each offer unique insights into how we're aging and how we can stay healthier, longer.'
The Star
16-07-2025
- Health
- The Star
Scientists develop tool to 'tell how fast someone is ageing'
WASHINGTON: Assessing how and why people age differently has long eluded doctors and scientists, particularly when there are no obvious explanations such as illness or history of injury. But a team of researchers at Duke University, Harvard University and the University of Otago believe they could have solved the riddle by developing a brain scan-based tool they say can "tell how fast someone is ageing", be that physically or cognitively. Following a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, the tool "can estimate your risk in midlife for chronic diseases that typically emerge decades later," the developers said, ahead of their findings being published in the journal Nature Aging. "Patterns of ageing detected during midlife are clinically useful among people in advanced age, including people with neurodegenerative disease," the researchers claimed. For older people, the tool can tell them if they are likely to develop dementia or "other age-related diseases," according to the team, which worked with around 50,000 scans from Canada, New Zealand, the UK, the US and countries in Latin America. The system measures blood pressure, body mass index, glucose and cholesterol levels, lung and kidney function, gum recession and tooth decay over time against a scan done when a person is 45 years old. For middle-aged people, the heads-up "could help motivate lifestyle and dietary changes that improve health," while for the elderly, a warning of susceptibility to dementia might mean "a better shot at slowing the course of disease" if given early enough, meaning "years before symptoms appear." "What's really cool about this is that we've captured how fast people are aging using data collected in midlife," said Ahmad Hariri, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, who claimed the device is helping "predict diagnosis of dementia among people who are much older." – dpa
New York Post
01-07-2025
- Health
- New York Post
New tool reveals how fast you're aging — and predicts dementia years before a diagnosis
Getting older is inevitable — but illness doesn't have to be. Scientists have developed a groundbreaking tool that can measure how fast a person is aging and predict their future risk of chronic diseases like dementia using a single brain MRI scan. Researchers say this early warning could give people the chance to make lifestyle changes while they're still young and healthy enough to potentially slow or even prevent health problems down the line. Advertisement 4 The tool can predict the rate a person is aging biologically using a single MRI scan. ihorvsn – The technology is the brainchild of scientists at Duke, Harvard and New Zealand's University of Otago, who used data from the Dunedin Study — a decades-long health project tracking over 1,000 New Zealanders born in the early '70s. Since birth, participants have been poked, scanned and tested regularly. Researchers have followed everything from their blood pressure and cholesterol to lung and kidney function to map how their bodies have changed over time. Advertisement From that mountain of data, the team crunched the numbers to see how fast each person was aging biologically — not based on their birthdate, but on the physical wear and tear their body had endured. Then they trained the tool, called DunedinPACE-NI, to predict those biological ages using just a single MRI scan of the brain that was taken when participants were 45 years old. Next, they put the tool to the test, using it to analyze brain scans from people across the US, UK, Canada and Latin America. 4 The tool relies on MRI scans of the brain to gauge the pace of aging. Ethan Whitman, Duke University Advertisement Across the board, they found that people with higher aging scores performed worse on cognitive tests and showed faster shrinkage in the hippocampus, the part of the brain crucial for memory and learning. In one analysis, those who the tool deemed to be aging fastest faced a 60% higher risk of developing dementia compared to people with lower scores. They also started to have memory and thinking problems sooner. When the team first saw the results, 'our jaws just dropped to the floor,' Ahmad Hariri, a Duke professor of psychology and neuroscience, said in a statement. Advertisement 'What's really cool about this is that we've captured how fast people are aging using data collected in midlife,' he noted. 'It's helping us predict diagnosis of dementia among people who are much older.' Brain decline wasn't the only red flag the tool picked up. People with higher DunedinPACE-NI scores were also more likely to suffer from age-related frailty, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and other chronic illnesses. 4 Dementia affects about 1 in 10 Americans over the age of 65. LIGHTFIELD STUDIOS – Even more striking, they were 40% more likely to die within the next several years than their slower-aging peers. Notably, the tool's accuracy held up across race, income and geographic location. 'It seems to be capturing something that is reflected in all brains,' Hariri said. A ticking clock Advertisement The new tool arrives as people are living longer than ever. By 2050, nearly a quarter of the global population will be over 65 — twice as many seniors as today, according to the World Health Organization. A longer life sometimes comes with a catch. 'More people are unfortunately going to experience chronic age-related diseases, including dementia,' Hariri said. 4 The tool could also help flag the risk of other age-related diseases, like stroke and heart attack. Pixel-Shot – Advertisement Studies predict 152.8 million people worldwide will be living with dementia in 25 years — up from 57.4 million cases in 2019. Despite this sharp rise, effective treatments for Alzheimer's and other dementias remain elusive. Most drugs on the market can help manage symptoms, but fail to stop or reverse the disease. One reason existing treatments haven't worked, Hariri theorized, is that they often start too late — after the disease has already done too much damage. Advertisement 'Drugs can't resurrect a dying brain,' he said. But the new tool could change that by identifying people at risk of Alzheimer's earlier, allowing for interventions before extensive brain damage occurs. Beyond just predicting dementia risk, the new clock will help scientists figure out why people with certain risk factors — like poor sleep or mental health issues — age differently, said Ethan Whitman, first author on the study and a clinical psychology PhD candidate at Duke. However, he noted that more work is needed to turn DunedinPACE-NI into a tool that everyday healthcare providers can use. Advertisement In the meantime, the team hopes the tool will help researchers with access to brain MRI data to measure aging in a way that algorithms based on other biomarkers, such as blood tests, can't. '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,' Hariri said.
