Magnetic resonance imaging monitors rapid aging and indicates a disease long before the symptoms

Ahmed Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, said: “The way we advance with our age is completely different from the number of times we traveled around the sun,” said Ahmed Hariri, Professor of Psychology and Neurology at Duke University.

Now, scientists in Duke, Harvard University and the University of Ottagu in New Zealand have developed a marine tool that can know how quickly a person aging, while they are still in good health – by looking at a snapshot of their brain.

From a single brain photography examination, the tool can estimate your middle -aged risk for chronic diseases that usually appear after decades. This information can help stimulate lifestyle and nutritional changes that improve health.

In the elderly, the tool can predict whether someone will develop dementia or other diseases related to age years before the symptoms appear, when they have a better snapshot in slowing the course of the disease.

Hariri said: “What is really wonderful about this is that we have picked up the rapid aging of people using the data collected in middle age,” Hariri said. “It helps us to predict the diagnosis of dementia among older people.”

The results were published on July 1 in the magazine The aging of nature.

Finding ways to slow down the decline associated with age is the key to helping people live a healthier and longer life. But first, “we need to know how we can monitor aging in an accurate way.”

Several algorithms have been developed to measure the person’s aging. Hariri said that most of these “aging hours” depend on the data collected from people of all ages at the same time, instead of following the same individuals with their age.

Hariri said: “The things that look like a faster aging may be simply due to the differences in exposure” to things such as preserved gasoline or cigarette smoke designated for their generation.

He added that the challenge is to reach a measure of the extent of the speed of revealing the process that does not confuse the environmental or historical factors that have nothing to do with aging.

To do this, the researchers relied on the data collected from about 1037 people who have been studied since birth as part of Deniden’s study, which was named after New Zealand, where they were born between 1972 and 1973.

Every few years, researchers searched for a Dundin study on changes in blood pressure for the participants, the body mass index, the levels of glucose and cholesterol, its function in the lung, kidneys and other measures – even stagnation of the gums and tooth decay.

They used the general pattern of change across these health signs for nearly 20 years to generate a degree of time for each person.

The new tool, named Dunedinpacni, was trained to estimate this rate of aging using only information from MRI scanned one brain collected from 860 participants in the Dundin study when they were 45 years old.

After that, the researchers used it to analyze brain tests in other data groups of people in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Latin America.

Faster than aging and high risk

Through data groups, they found that people who were advancing in aging faster through this procedure were worse in cognitive tests and showed a faster contraction in the hippocampus, a decisive brain region of memory.

The most realistic, they were also more likely to experience the cognitive decline in subsequent years.

In one of the analyzes, the researchers examined brain tests from 624 individuals between the ages of 52 to 89 from North America’s study of the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Those who considered the tool advanced in aging faster when they joined the study were 60 % more likely to develop dementia in the years. They also started getting memory and thinking problems sooner than those who were progressing in a slower aging.

When the team saw the results for the first time, “We just fell on the ground,” Hariri said.

Links between the body and the brain

The researchers also found that people who indicated Dundinpacni’s degrees indicated that they were faster they were more likely to decrease in health in general, not only in their brain function.

People with more fragile aging degrees were more fragile and more vulnerable to experimenting with age -related health problems such as heart attacks, lung diseases or strokes.

AGEERS faster is likely to be diagnosed with a minor with a chronic disease over the next few years compared to people with average aging rates.

The researchers found that it was more concerned, and they were also 40 % more likely to die during this time frame than those who were old.

Hariri said: “The relationship between the aging of the brain and the body is very convincing.”

The connections between the speed of aging and dementia were equally strong in demographic, social and economic groups from those that were trained on the model, including a sample of people from Latin America, as well as the participants in the United Kingdom who were low or non -white.

Hariri said: “It seems that he picks up something reflected in all minds,” Hariri said.

Work is important because people all over the world live longer. In the coming decades, the number of people over the age of 65 is expected to double, reaching nearly a quarter of the world’s population by 2050.

“But since we live a longer life, more people will suffer from chronic age diseases, including dementia,” Hariri said.

The economic dementia burden is already huge. Research indicates that the global cost of Alzheimer’s care, for example, will grow from $ 1.33 trillion in 2020 to 9.12 trillion dollars in 2050 – similar or larger than diseases such as lung disease or diabetes that affects more people.

Effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease have proven far. Most medications approved can help manage symptoms but fail to stop or reversal.

One of the potential explanations of the reason for not working drugs so far is that it has started too late, when Alzheimer’s proteins that accumulate in and already around neurons have already been around.

Hariri said: “Drugs cannot revive a brain that dies,” Hariri said.

But in the future, the new tool can make it possible to identify people who may be on their way to Alzheimer’s disease soon, and evaluate interventions to stop it-before the brain damage becomes widespread, and without waiting for follow-up contracts.

In addition to predicting the risk of dementia over time, the new watch will also help scientists a better understanding of people with certain risk factors, such as poor sleep or mental health conditions, at a different age, as the first author Ethan Whitman, who works at a doctorate degree. In clinical psychology with Hariri and the study participating in the authorship of Terry Movit and Fashalum Casbi, as well as professors of psychology and neuroscience in Duke.

Whitman added that more research is needed to apply for Dundinpacni from a search tool to something that has practical applications in the field of health care.

But in the meantime, the team hopes to help the tool for researchers in accessing the MRI data to measure the rates of aging in ways in which the aging watches cannot be on the basis of other vital indicators, such as blood tests.

Hariri said: “We are really thinking about the matter as a major new tool in predicting and predicting risk, especially Alzheimer’s and relevant dementia, and may have gained a better foothold on the development of the disease,” Hariri said.

The authors have applied a patent to work. This research has been supported by the American National Institute of Ouar Agency (R01ag049789, R01ag032282, R01ag073207), UK Medical Research Council (MR/x021149/1), and New Zealand Health Research Council (16-604 Program Grant).