Cross-sectional brain age assessments are limited in predicting future brain change

Abstract

The concept of brain age (BA) describes an integrative imaging marker of brain health, often suggested to reflect ageing processes. However, the degree to which cross-sectional MRI features, including BA, reflect past, ongoing and future brain changes across different tissue types from macro-to microstructure remains controversial (Vidal-Pineiro et al. 2021). Here, we advance these findings by using multimodal imaging data of 39, 325 UK Biobank participants, aged 44 - 82 years at baseline and 2, 520 follow-ups within 1.12 - 6.90 years. In concordance with the original findings, we find insufficient evidence that BA reflects the rate of brain ageing. However, modality-specific differences in brain ages reflected the state of the brain, highlighting diffusion and multimodal MRI brain age as potentially useful cross-sectional markers.