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

Researchers trained an artificial intelligence model to gauge people's ages from their brain scans The abundance of 13 proteins in your blood seems to be a strong indicator of how rapidly your brain is ageing. This suggests that blood tests could one day help people track and even boost their brain health. Most previous studies that have looked at protein markers of brain ageing in the blood have involved fewer than 1000 people, says Nicholas Seyfried at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who wasn't involved in the new research. To get a broader idea of the impact of these proteins, Wei-Shi Liu at Fudan University in China and his colleagues analysed MRI brain scan data from nearly 11,000 adults from the UK Biobank project, whose ages ranged from around 50 to 80 at the time of imaging. Using data from 70 per cent of the participants, Liu's team trained an artificial intelligence model to predict how old the participants were based on features of the brain images, such as the size of different brain regions and how distinct parts connected to each other.