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