Approved research

Brain ageing model: identifying neuroimaging patterns with relevance to neurodegeneration

Lay summary

This project will model healthy brain ageing from routine brain scans. The study is motivated by the lack of understanding of why peoples' brains age in different ways, and why some people are more likely to develop dementia as they get older, whilst others stay healthy or have only mild memory problems. The key component of our approach is in using statistical tools to examine healthy brain ageing based on patterns from routine brain scans. We will identify (i) those patterns shared between people as they age and (ii) map out those changes across the lifespan with potential relevance to dementia. By mapping out changes in the healthy brain, we will look for patterns that might predispose someone to a particular type of dementia. The advantage of our approach is that it will be developed on standard clinical brain images and therefore can be easily used in hospital or memory clinic settings. This project is planned for 3 years to gain the maximum amount of insight from the UK BioBank cohort.