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A study in PLOS Medicine found higher brain age estimates among people with Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, alcohol addiction and some psychiatric conditions. The analysis found different patterns across brain regions, but it cannot show that the conditions cause accelerated brain aging.
A study of brain scans found that Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, alcohol addiction and several psychiatric conditions were associated with brains that appeared older than expected for a person’s age. Published in PLOS Medicine, the research also found different regional patterns across conditions, offering a way to investigate how they relate to brain structure without establishing that any condition causes faster aging.
Led by Shile Qi of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China, the team analyzed structural MRI scans from 45,900 control participants drawn from several brain imaging databases. The researchers compared those data with scans from 2,698 people with a range of conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and alcohol or tobacco addiction.
The analysis used predictive age difference, or PAD: a comparison between a person’s chronological age and an age estimate based on brain imaging. A positive PAD means the brain appears older than expected for that age. Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment had the strongest associations with higher PAD among the conditions examined. Addiction and psychiatric disorders were also associated with higher values. The researchers found no overall PAD difference between controls and people with ADHD or autism spectrum disorder.
The team also examined patterns across brain regions and compared them with gene expression. The prefrontal cortex showed higher PAD across multiple disorders. Psychiatric conditions were associated with elevated PAD in the frontal and temporal lobes, dementia with higher PAD in the frontal and occipital cortex, and addiction with higher PAD in the default mode and salience networks, putamen and thalamus.
Regional Patterns May Guide Research
The findings suggest that a single brain age estimate may not capture the same pattern across all conditions. The regional differences reported by the team could help researchers ask whether particular brain structures or networks are associated with particular disorders, and whether those patterns correspond to different biological processes.
The study authors say further work on PAD could eventually help identify biomarkers linked to common brain disorders and provide clues about pathways involved in them. That possibility remains a research direction, not a clinical result: the report does not establish that PAD can diagnose a condition, predict an individual’s outcome or guide treatment.
The comparisons also help put the results in perspective. Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment showed the strongest associations in this analysis, while ADHD and autism spectrum disorder did not show an overall difference from controls. Those findings describe group-level comparisons in the studied data; they do not determine what a scan means for any one person.
How Researchers Estimate Brain Age
Brain age estimates use imaging measurements to compare features of a scan with patterns associated with age. In this study, PAD measured the gap between estimated and chronological age. A positive value indicated an older appearing brain relative to the person’s age; it was not itself a diagnosis or a direct measure of how quickly an individual’s brain was changing over time.
The research combined data from multiple imaging databases and assessed a broad range of conditions and differences. The report describes an observational comparison of existing scans, rather than an experiment that assigned exposures or followed participants to establish when changes began. The authors also examined gene transcription patterns, but the reported associations do not show that particular gene activity produced the imaging findings.
The study was supported by the Key Research and Development Plan of Jiangsu Province and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. The report says the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, publication decisions or manuscript preparation.
“Different neurological disorders appear to leave different signatures on the brain aging clock, which may help researchers better understand the neural and biological pathways involved in these conditions.”
— The study authors
Causation and Overlap Remain Open
The study is correlational, so it cannot determine whether a condition leads to changes in brain age estimates, whether other factors contribute to both, or how the relationship develops over time. The report does not specify that participants were tracked longitudinally, and it gives no basis for treating a higher PAD as a measure of an individual’s rate of brain aging.
The authors also caution that psychiatric disorders and addiction can occur together. That overlap makes it difficult to separate the association linked to one condition from effects related to another condition or shared factors. The reported analysis does not resolve those contributions.
It is also unclear from the report how well the observed patterns would apply to people outside the samples represented in the imaging databases. No validated clinical test, diagnostic threshold, or treatment recommendation is reported. The possibility that PAD could contribute to biomarkers remains unconfirmed and dependent on further research.
Further Studies Must Test the Signal
The immediate next step is further research to determine whether the brain region patterns can be reproduced in other groups and whether they remain when overlapping conditions and other factors are accounted for. The source report does not announce a specific follow-up study or timetable.
Researchers would also need to establish what PAD can and cannot tell clinicians before using it as a biomarker. That would require evidence beyond an association in scan data, including work showing whether the measure is reliable and useful for a defined research or clinical purpose. For now, the study offers comparative evidence about brain imaging patterns, while their causes and practical application remain unresolved.
Key Questions
Which conditions had the strongest links to higher brain age estimates?
Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment showed the strongest associations with higher predictive age difference among the conditions examined.
Did the study find higher estimates for ADHD or autism?
The researchers found no overall difference in PAD between controls and people with ADHD or autism spectrum disorder in this analysis.
Does a higher PAD prove that a disorder causes faster brain aging?
No. The study was correlational and cannot establish cause and effect or show how an individual’s brain changes over time.
Could this measure be used to diagnose a disorder?
The report does not establish PAD as a diagnostic test. Its possible use in future biomarker research would need further study and validation.
Source: rss
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