A new study may have found a predictor of whether a person is likely to develop dementia later in life. Currently, memory clinics use visual rating scales to assess brain atrophy that signals dementia, but are unable to catch subtle changes associated with the early stages of the disease. Dementia is an umbrella term for diseases that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer's disease, and affects memory, thinking, and the ability to perform daily activities.
In 2021 alone, 57 million people worldwide were living with dementia, according to the World Health Organization. Early symptoms include forgetting things or recent events, getting lost or confused even in familiar places, problems following or making conversation, and feeling anxious or angry and exhibiting inappropriate behavior. There is no cure for dementia, and as the condition progresses, the patient may not be able to recognize loved ones, move around, eat, drink, or control their bladder or bowels.
Now, researchers have suggested that a measure of how old a person's brain appears on brain scans, compared with their actual age, may be a predictor for developing dementia at a later age, and may predict the risk years before doctors can see it. Researcher Stefan De Vries told Newsweek: "A key insight from our study is that computer-estimated age from brain MRI (brain age) adds information beyond visual assessments by radiologists in people with subjective cognitive decline, but not in those with mild cognitive impairment. "This suggests that brain age may be particularly useful in the very early stages of the disease, when changes in the brain can be too subtle to detect through visual assessment alone." The team at Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands looked at data from patients between 2002 and 2024, and used advanced AI-based computer algorithms to determine how old a person's brain appeared on MRI scans, comparing that estimate with the person's actual age.
They called the mismatch between this estimate and the real age brain-PAD, and tested whether it could identify which brains were experiencing mild cognitive impairment which can lead to dementia. Their research found that a structurally older brain was a significant warning sign—for every year a patient's brain appeared older than the actual age, the risk of dementia increased by 6 percent. Identifying dementia early allows doctors to develop a strategy for each patient, and they usually use MRI scans to detect brain shrinkage.
However, if the new approach is able to catch more subtle changes, the disease or risk of disease could be caught earlier. The researchers used medical records from patients at the Alzheimer Center at Amsterdam UMC over a 22-year period, using 412 patients with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) who reported memory problems despite a normal test score, and 387 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with subtle but measurable issues with cognition. They looked at each patient's structural MRI scan, a score from a cognitive test, and the findings from the traditional visual ratings of the MRI, according to Medical Xpress.
Researchers then used their AI-based algorithm to calculate the brain age and difference. It found that an older-looking brain age was a clear red flag for developing dementia in the future. However, if an SCD patient's brain looked at least 2.6 years younger than the actual age, they had up to 99 percent chance of not developing dementia in the next two to 10 years.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
