Scientists believe brain scans will soon be able to give us a clear picture of how fast we're ageing even decades before health problems appear on the horizon. — Photo: BENJAMIN NOLTE/dpa
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
