Nearly 49,000 brain scans reveal aging signatures linked to dementia, addiction and mental illness - Medical Xpress

What the report says

Medical Xpress reported on July 21, 2026, that a PLOS Medicine study found measurable “brain aging” patterns associated with several neurological and psychiatric conditions. The study was led by Shile Qi of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China and colleagues, using structural MRI data to compare brain-age estimates across large imaging datasets.

The researchers analyzed scans from 45,900 control participants and 2,698 people with conditions or neurodevelopmental differences including Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, alcohol or tobacco addiction, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorder. They used a measure called predictive age difference, or PAD, which compares a person’s chronological age with the age suggested by brain imaging. A higher PAD indicates that the brain appears older than expected.

According to the report, Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment showed the strongest association with increased PAD. Alcohol addiction and psychiatric disorders were also linked to higher brain-age measures, while ADHD and autism spectrum disorder did not differ from controls on this measure. The study also identified region-specific patterns: psychiatric conditions were associated with higher PAD in frontal and temporal areas, dementia with frontal and occipital regions, and addiction with areas including the default mode and salience networks, putamen and thalamus.

Medical Xpress noted that the findings are correlational rather than proof that these conditions cause accelerated aging. The researchers suggested that distinct brain-aging signatures, together with related gene-expression patterns, could help inform future biomarker research for common brain disorders.