The right side of the brain shows more signs of aging than the left, new study suggests
A new AI tool that analyzes MRI scans in fine detail reveals that the human brain does not age evenly. Some regions appear to age faster than others, with these differences becoming more pronounced in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
A PNAS study introduces an innovative AI method to map brain aging at a detailed level, revealing that certain regions tend to age more rapidly than others. Researchers utilized MRI scans of 14,748 cognitively healthy adults aged 19 to 100 to train a deep learning model, which then created a spatial map illustrating local brain age.
When tested on a separate group of 1,985 individuals, including those with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment, the model estimated that the right hemisphere of the brain generally exhibited an older biological age than the left. In Alzheimer's patients, subcortical structures such as the pallidum and putamen displayed brain age gaps up to 3.6 years higher than the norm, while the hippocampus appeared on average three years older than in cognitively healthy adults.
These findings suggest that brain aging is not uniform across regions and that regional differences in aging patterns become more pronounced in cognitive decline.
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