Thirteen proteins in your blood can reveal the age of your brain

The abundance of 13 proteins in your blood appears to be a strong indicator of how quickly your brain is aging. This suggests that blood tests could one day help people track and boost brain health.

Most previous studies that have looked at protein markers of brain aging have included blood Less than 1000 peopleHe says Nicholas Seyfried at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who was not involved in the new research.

To get a broader idea of ​​the effect of these proteins, Wei Xi Liu He and his colleagues at Fudan University in China analyzed MRI brain scan data from nearly 11,000 adults from the UK Biobank project, who ranged in age from about 50 to 80 years old at the time of imaging.

Using data from 70% of participants, Liu’s team trained an AI model to predict participants’ age based on features of brain images, such as the size of different brain regions and how well different parts are connected to each other. When the model was applied to the remaining 30% of participants, its predictions were accurate within 2.7 years of their actual age.

The researchers then used the model to predict the age of a separate group of nearly 4,700 people, aged 63 on average, whose brains were also imaged for the UK Biobank. The team calculated the difference between the actual ages of these participants and those predicted by the AI, called the brain age gap. “The higher the AI ​​life expectancy relative to their actual age, the faster their brains will age,” Liu says.

This group also gave blood samples around the same time their brains were imaged. From this, the team identified eight proteins that appeared to increase in abundance, and five proteins that became less abundant, with a larger gap in brain age.

In an analysis of data from previous studies, researchers confirmed that proteins are produced by brain cells and that their levels may affect the risk of dementia and stroke.

This suggests that blood tests for these proteins could indicate how quickly someone’s brain is aging. “These signs may be the canary in the coal mine to tell you, ‘Hey, look, let’s start intervening to slow your brain aging now while you have enough time,'” Seyfried says.

But for this to be useful, we need to know that these proteins can be changed by lifestyle changes. “You want to be able to say, ‘If you run this much, you lose this much weight,’ and change your diet, [then] “You can adjust these levels to bring them back into the normal range,” says Seyfried.

The research was conducted mostly on wealthy, white people, so more research is needed to see if the findings apply to other populations of more diverse ethnicities and income levels, Seyfried says.

The team now hopes to conduct animal research to determine how the 13 proteins affect the brain. For example, researchers might test whether imbalances in the levels of these proteins affect cognition or even the development of neurodegenerative conditions, Liu says. “In the next two decades, this could open ways to target proteins to slow aging and disease.”

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