Research Outline
Brain aging and neurodegeneration represent central hallmarks of systemic aging and have been increasingly recognized as major contributors to multi-organ vulnerability. Emerging evidence indicates that accelerated brain aging is tightly linked with immune senescence, chronic inflammation, endocrine dysregulation, and metabolic dysfunction-all of which are well-established drivers of tumor initiation and progression. However, the biological and systemic pathways connecting brain aging to cancer incidence, subtype-specific risk, and long-term outcomes remain insufficiently understood.
This project aims to address these critical knowledge gaps by integrating neuroimaging, multi-omics, and longitudinal clinical outcomes from UK Biobank.
(1) Quantify brain aging using structural MRI, diffusion imaging, and machine-learning-based brain-age models.
(2) Identify systemic biological signatures linking brain aging with multi-cancer risk-immune aging markers, chronic inflammation, metabolic decline, endocrine aging, and microbiome profiles.
(3) Construct multi-organ aging interaction networks describing how neurodegeneration interacts with immune, metabolic, and endocrine aging.
(4) Develop integrated prediction models combining brain aging phenotypes, multi-omics biomarkers, genetics, and lifestyle factors to forecast incident cancer, recurrence, and cancer-specific mortality.
