Latest news with #Hariri
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
Time of India
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Making sense of Donald Trump's world view
Robin David is resident editor of The Times of India's Hyderabad edition. His first book, City of Fear, was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award in 2007. To understand why US President Donald Trump doesn't think twice before causing upheaval, like attempting to bar Harvard University from admitting foreign students or arm twisting Apple into not manufacturing iPhones in India, one has to understand his worldview. In his piece in the Financial Times on April 18, historian-philosopher Yuval Noah Harir does just that, saying that Trump's understanding of how the world works is diametrically opposite to the liberal order. Liberals believe that cooperation between countries is a win-win strategy, Hariri says. They also believe that people may live in different countries and cultures but have shared experiences and interests, which form the basis for universal values, global organisations and international laws. By contrast, Trump sees winners and losers in all human transactions and, therefore, views the movement of ideas, goods and people with suspicion. He sees the world as a 'mosaic of fortresses' where countries feel safe behind high walls. Hariri says such an ordering of the world would collapse because smaller countries would be overrun by bigger, more powerful ones. Also, all countries would have to invest heavily in defence, eating into welfare expenditure. Finally, Trump would like weaker countries to be subservient to stronger ones, but the history of the Vietnam War and other such conflicts has shown that the strong don't always prevail. There is, however, one key aspect that Hariri missed out on why this mosaic of fortresses doesn't work. The economic and military powerhouses of the West – the US and much of Western Europe – are fast becoming countries of old men (and women). They are seeing declining birth rates and longer life expectancy, which, in the next few years, will create a growing shortage of young working-age people who can keep their economic wheels turning. Populists may have come to power in many Western countries by pushing an anti-migrant agenda. But if they start running out of young people, they will have no option but to let migrants in to ensure that their economies don't implode. Projections of the United Nations population division and the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, give a clear picture of where populations are dipping and what jobs will be available in different parts of the world in the next 15 to 25 years. By UN estimates, Central and Southern Asia are expected to become the most populous regions in the world by 2037 even as the population of Eastern and South-Eastern Asia could start declining by the mid-2030s. If the projections are correct, Southeast Asia and Africa will also see growing populations. 'Between 2022 and 2050, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to almost double, surpassing 2 billion inhabitants by the late 2040s, and is projected to account for more than half of the growth of the world's population between 2022 and 2050,' the UN projections say. These regions with high population growth rates will, simultaneously, see comparatively slower job creation. The World Bank said in its jobs and growth overview in March that developing countries will see 1.2 billion young people reach working age over the next decade but will be able to create only 420 million jobs at current growth rates. 'Among those youth who will get a job, few will find good jobs, where workers can be more productive and earn more,' the outlook said. 'Without immediate action, millions of young people could be left behind, deprived of opportunity and hope—with wider impacts for social stability and economic growth.' The answer may lie in preparing the youth of countries like India and those in other parts of Asia and African to fill that hole in the West created by missing young workers. According to the UN numbers, Europe and Northern America are projected to reach peak population size and begin experiencing population decline in the late 2030s. That is barely a decade away. The Future of Work Report 2025, which surveyed more than 1,000 employers 'representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies', echoed these numbers. Some 40% of its respondents believe that shifting demographics would shape how and where people will find work in the next few years. 'In higher-income nations, aging populations are increasing dependency ratios, potentially putting greater pressure on a smaller pool of working-age individuals and raising concerns about long-term labour availability,' it says. 'In contrast, lower-income economies may benefit from a demographic dividend. These demographic shifts have a direct impact on global labour supply.' According to the WEF report, employers facing the effects of an aging population are more pessimistic about talent availability and expect facing bigger challenges in attracting talent. It is, of course, difficult to predict how this labour shortage in one corner of the world, and a spike in another corner, will play out in the next few years; how Western countries that see a cultural threat in growing migrant populations will reconcile and welcome back the same people they are pushing away now. But the possibility of the developed world looking for skilled manpower in the future is high. If projections by the UN and others are correct, the drawbridges will come down. And, if countries like India play their cards right, their youth would be the first to storm these fortresses. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
LBCI
13-06-2025
- LBCI
LBCI sources: Beirut airport operating normally, Cyprus airspace adopted
LBCI has learned that Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport remains fully operational, with westbound air traffic continuing as scheduled. Flights are currently using Cyprus' airspace.
Bloomberg
03-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Ex-Lebanese PM Sets Up Abu Dhabi Investment Firm Targeting AI
Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri is launching an investment firm in Abu Dhabi, deepening his ties to the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The entity, Genesis SPV Ltd., was registered in ADGM late last month with Hariri as its sole listed shareholder, according to the financial free zone's filings.
