ArticleAlzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association2021
The "cognitive clock": A novel indicator of brain health.
Article in Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Source-space EEG alpha activity reveals brain age gaps due to neurodegeneration and disparity.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Lifestyle and Chronic Comorbidity in Relation to Healthy Ageing in Community-Dwelling People Aged 80 and over: Preliminary Study from a Primary Health Care Service in Southern Spain.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries.Nature aging · 2025Article
- Creative experiences and brain clocks.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reassessing metrics: The limitations of brain function as indicators of brain health.Pakistan journal of medical sciences · 2025Article
- Optimizing Cognitive Health: The Promise and Challenges of Physical-Cognitive Interventions for Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment.Alpha psychiatry · 2025Article
- Development and Validation of a Tool to Predict Onset of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer Dementia.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Brain clocks capture diversity and disparities in aging and dementia across geographically diverse populations.Nature medicine · 2024Article
- Brain clocks capture diversity and disparity in aging and dementia.Research square · 2024Article
- Toward digitally screening and profiling AD: A GAMLSS approach of MemTrax in China.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2024Article
- Article
- Predicting age at Alzheimer's dementia onset with the cognitive clock.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2023Article
- Association between serum globulin and cognitive impairment in older American adults.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Article
- Identification of appropriate tools to gauge brain functions in a clinical setup of a developing country: A pilot study.Pakistan journal of medical sciencesArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
Abstract
introductionWe identified a "cognitive clock," a novel indicator of brain health that provides person-specific estimates of cognitive age, and tested the hypothesis that cognitive age is a better predictor of brain health than chronological age in two independent datasets.
methodsThe initial analyses were based on 1057 participants from the Rush Memory and Aging Project and the Religious Orders Study who began without impairment and underwent cognitive assessments up to 24 years. A shape invariant model characterized the latent pattern of cognitive decline, conceptualized here as the "cognitive clock," and yielded person-specific estimates of cognitive age. Survival analyses examined cognitive versus chronological age for predicting Alzheimer's disease dementia, mild cognitive impairment and mortality, and regression analyses examined associations of cognitive versus chronological age with neuropathology and brain atrophy. Finally, we applied the cognitive clock to an independent validation sample of 2592 participants from the Chicago Health and Aging Project, a biracial population-based study, to confirm the predictive utility of cognitive age.
resultsThe "cognitive clock" showed that cognition remained stable until a cognitive age of about 80, then declined moderately until 90, then declined precipitously. In the initial dataset, cognitive age was a better predictor of dementia, mild cognitive impairment and mortality than chronological age, and was more strongly associated with neuropathology and brain atrophy. Application of the cognitive clock to the independent validation sample provided further support for the utility of cognitive age as a strong prognostic indicator of adverse outcomes. DISCUSSION: Cognitive age is a robust prognostic indicator of adverse health outcomes and may serve as a useful biomarker in aging research.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.