Brain scans could determine your exact age within a year

Washington -  Sophisticated brain scans can be used to accurately predict age, give or take a year, a new study has revealed.

It isn’t uncommon for people to pass for ages much older or younger than their years, but according to the researchers of the new study, this feature doesn't apply to our brains.

It’s a “carnival trick” that may have deeper implications for both brain science and medicine.

“We have uncovered a ‘developmental clock’ of sorts within the brain—a biological signature of maturation that captures age differences quite well, regardless of other kinds of differences that exist across individuals,” Timothy Brown of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, said.

Together with UCSD’s Anders Dale and Terry Jernigan and researchers from nine other universities, Brown used structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of 885 people ranging in age from 3 to 20.

Those brain scans were used to identify 231 biomarkers of brain anatomy that, when combined, could assess an individual’s age with more than 92 percent accuracy. That’s beyond what’s been possible with any other biological measure, the researchers said.

While others had looked at some of the same brain biomarkers in the past one by one, the key was finding a way to combine them to capture the multidimensional nature of brain anatomy and characteristic patterns of developmental change with age.

It is  not yet clear how these anatomical changes in the brain will relate to maturity in terms of human behaviour, which we all know isn’t necessarily reflected by our chronological age.

“The anatomy and physiology of these dynamic, interacting neural systems, which we can probe in different ways with MRI scans, have to account for the changes we all observe in human psychological development,” Brown said.

“We’re still figuring out exactly how,” Brown added.

The study has been findings published online in Current Biology.