ArticleFrontiers in aging neuroscience2022
Linking Brain Age Gap to Mental and Physical Health in the Berlin Aging Study II.
Article in Frontiers in aging neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cardiometabolic risk factors and brain age: a meta-analysis to quantify brain structural differences related to diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNPooled it
- Your brain doesn't look a day past 70! Cross-sectional associations with brain-predicted age in the cognitively-intact oldest-old.GeroScience · 2026Article
- The Transdiagnostic Association Between Childhood Trauma and Accelerated Brain Aging in Two Independent Datasets.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- Brain Ageing in Social Anxiety Disorder: An ENIGMA-Anxiety Mega-Analysis Across 26 International Cohorts.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Exposome-wide patterns predict brain health in aging.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Comprehensive cross-sectional and longitudinal comparison of sixteen markers of biological aging from the Berlin Aging Study II.Communications medicine · 2026Article
- Biological brain aging, cognitive-motor decline and vascular risk: a multivariate imaging analysis of 40,579 individuals.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Article
- One-month early time-restricted eating mitigates brain aging and enhances memory in males with metabolic syndrome: an MRI structural study.Frontiers in aging · 2026Article
- Genome-wide analysis of brain age identifies 59 associated loci and unveils relationships with mental and physical health.Nature aging · 2025Article
- Network Occlusion Sensitivity Analysis Identifies Regional Contributions to Brain Age Prediction.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- The negative relationship between brain-age gap and psychological resilience defines the age-related neurocognitive status in older people.GeroScience · 2025Article
- Lifestyle, Early-life, and Genetic Health Risk Factors Underlying the Brain Age Gap: A Mega-Analysis Across 3,934 Individuals from the ENIGMA MDD Consortium.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- There Are Multiple Clocks That Time Us: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Associations Among 14 Alternative Indicators of Age and Aging.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2025Article
- Metabolic Status Modulates Global and Local Brain Age Estimates in Overweight and Obese Adults.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Temporal autocorrelation is predictive of age-An extensive MEG time-series analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A review of artificial intelligence-based brain age estimation and its applications for related diseases.Briefings in functional genomics · 2025Review
- Mediating role of muscle quality in the liver-brain axis: integrated analysis of CT markers of body composition, brain aging, and biomarkers.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
- More than chronic pain: behavioural and psychosocial protective factors predict lower brain age in adults with/at risk of knee osteoarthritis over two years.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Association between shift work and brain age gap: a neuroimaging study using MRI-based brain age prediction algorithms.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 6 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
From a biological perspective, humans differ in the speed they age, and this may manifest in both mental and physical health disparities. The discrepancy between an individual's biological and chronological age of the brain ("brain age gap") can be assessed by applying machine learning techniques to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. Here, we examined the links between brain age gap and a broad range of cognitive, affective, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and physical health variables in up to 335 adults of the Berlin Aging Study II. Brain age gap was assessed using a validated prediction model that we previously trained on MRI scans of 32,634 UK Biobank individuals. Our statistical analyses revealed overall stronger evidence for a link between higher brain age gap and less favorable health characteristics than expected under the null hypothesis of no effect, with 80% of the tested associations showing hypothesis-consistent effect directions and 23% reaching nominal significance. The most compelling support was observed for a cluster covering both cognitive performance variables (episodic memory, working memory, fluid intelligence, digit symbol substitution test) and socioeconomic variables (years of education and household income). Furthermore, we observed higher brain age gap to be associated with heavy episodic drinking, higher blood pressure, and higher blood glucose. In sum, our results point toward multifaceted links between brain age gap and human health. Understanding differences in biological brain aging may therefore have broad implications for future informed interventions to preserve mental and physical health in old age.
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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.