Information provided by: Gavin Giovannoni, aka Prof G @GavinGiovannoni
Are you ready for some hard-to-process information about the impact of MS on your #BrainHealth?
Did you know brain age is a surrogate marker for cognitive performance in pwMS?
Knowing your brain’s age will tell you something about your cognition. =>
Abstract
Background
Data from neuro-imaging techniques allow us to estimate a brain’s age. Brain age is easily interpretable as “how old the brain looks”, and could therefore be an attractive communication tool for brain health in clinical practice. This study aimed to investigate its clinical utility by investigating the relationship between brain age and cognitive performance in multiple sclerosis (MS).
Methods
A linear regression model was trained to predict age from brain MRI volumetric features and sex in a healthy control dataset (HC_train, n=1673). This model was used to predict brain age in two test sets: HC_test (n=50) and MS_test (n=201). Brain-Predicted Age Difference (BPAD) was calculated as BPAD=brain age minus chronological age. Cognitive performance was assessed by the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT).
Results
Brain age was significantly related to SDMT scores in the MS_test dataset (r=-0.46, p<.001), and contributed uniquely to variance in SDMT beyond chronological age, reflected by a significant correlation between BPAD and SDMT (r=-0.24, p<.001) and a significant weight (-0.25, p=0.002) in a multivariate regression equation with age.
Conclusions
Brain age is a candidate biomarker for cognitive dysfunction in MS and an easy to grasp metric for brain health.
see this complete article, here
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