A new tool reveals the speed you grow old and predicts dementia years before a diagnosis

Aging is inevitable, but the disease should not be.

Scientists have developed an innovative tool that can measure the speed that a person ages and predicts his future risk of chronic diseases such as dementia through a single brain exploration.

The researchers say that this early warning could give people the opportunity to make changes in the lifestyle while they are young and healthy enough to be potentially slow or even prevent health problems.

Technology is the idea of ​​scientists from Duke, Harvard and the University of New Zealand in Otago, who used Dunedin’s study data, a decades of health project that follows more than 1,000 New Zealanders born in the early 1970’s.

Since birth, participants have been dragged, scanned and tested regularly. The researchers have followed, from their blood pressure and cholesterol to the lung and renal function to map their bodies over time.

From this mountain of data, the team crushed the numbers to see how quickly each person was biologically aging, not based on his date of birth, but on physical wear and tearing his body.

They then trained the tool, called Dunedinpace-Ni, to predict those biological ages using only one RMN exploration of the brain that was performed when participants were 45 years old.

They then put the tool in the test, using it to analyze the brain explorations of people in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Latin America.

Through the table, they found that people with higher aging scores worked worse in cognitive tests and showed faster contraction to the hippocampus, the part of the crucial brain for memory and learning.

In an analysis, those that the tool considered to be growing faster with a risk of 60% greater to develop dementia compared to people with lower scores. They also began to have problems with memory and thought sooner.

When the team first saw the results, “our jaws had just dropped to the ground,” said Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, in a statement.

“What is really fantastic is that we have caught the speed that people grow older through data collected in a half -life,” he said. “It helps us to predict the diagnosis of dementia among people who are very large.”

The cerebral decay was not the only red flag that collected the tool.

People with higher duedinpace-ninity scores were also more likely to suffer from age-related fragility, heart attacks, stroke, lung diseases, and other chronic diseases.

Even more surprising, they were 40% more likely to die for the coming years than their slower aging companions.

Above all, the accuracy of the tool was maintained through race, revenue and geographical location.

“It seems to be capturing something that is reflected in all brains,” Hariri said.

A scoring clock

The new tool comes as people live more than ever. By 2050, almost quarter of the world population will be more than 65 years old, twice as many old people today, according to the World Health Organization.

Sometimes a longer life comes with a capture.

“Unfortunately, more people will experience chronic diseases related to age, including dementia,” Hariri said.

Studies predict that 152.8 million people worldwide will live with dementia in 25 years, up to 57.4 million cases in 2019.

Despite this sharp increase, effective Alzheimer’s and other dementia treatments are evident. Most market drugs can help manage symptoms, but not stop or reverse disease.

One of the reasons why existing treatments have not worked, Hariri theorized, is that they often start too late, after the disease has already done too much damage.

“Drugs cannot resurrect a dying brain,” he said.

But the new tool could change it by identifying people at risk of Alzheimer’s previously, allowing interventions before extensive brain damage occurs.

Beyond predicting the risk of dementia, the new clock will help scientists discover why people with certain risk factors, such as mental or mental health problems, are differently aging, Ethan Whitman, the first study author and a candidate for clinical psychology in Duke.

However, he said that more work is needed to convert Dunedinpace-Ni into a tool that everyday healthcare suppliers can use.

The team, meanwhile, hopes that the tool will help researchers with access to brain magnetic resonance data to measure aging so that algorithms based on other biomarkers, such as blood tests, cannot.

“We really think that we hope it will be a new key tool to foresee and predict the risk of diseases, especially Alzheimer’s and related dementia, and also perhaps gain a better point in the progression of the disease,” Hariri said.