AI-calculated brain age predicts dementia risk years before doctors can see it
Memory clinics still rely on visual rating scales to assess brain atrophy, yet these tools lack the sensitivity to catch subtle changes associated with early dementia. A measure of how old a person's brain appears on brain scans compared with their actual age might be a potential predictor of who is more likely to develop dementia over the years, reports a new study published in Neurology.
For every year a patient's brain appeared older than their actual age in MRI scans, the risk of developing dementia increased by 6%, according to a new study published in Neurology. Researchers in the Netherlands utilized artificial intelligence to estimate brain age from medical data collected between 2002 and 2024 from patients in a national dementia cohort.
This "brain-predicted age difference" (brain-PAD) proved to be a valuable predictor of dementia, even outperforming standard visual rating scales that assess brain shrinkage. For each additional year of brain-PAD, the risk of dementia rose by 4%. While brain-PAD added significant value in identifying subjective cognitive decline patients who were more likely to progress to dementia, it did not offer substantial additional predictive power for mild cognitive impairment patients.
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