New tool reveals how fast youre 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.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.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.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.“Wha...