Document Type

Article

Abstract

‘Brain age’ is a biological clock typically used to describe brain health with one number, but its relationship with established gradients of cortical organization remains unclear. We address this gap by leveraging a data-driven, region-specific brain age approach in 335 neurologically intact adults, using a convolutional neural network (volBrain) to estimate regional brain ages directly from structural MRI without a predefined set of morphometric properties. Six distinct gradients of brain aging are replicated in two independent cohorts. Spatial patterns of accelerated brain aging in older adults quantitatively align with the archetypal sensorimotor-to-association axis of cortical organization. Other brain aging gradients reflect neurobiological hierarchies such as gene expression and externopyramidization. Participant-level correspondences to brain age gradients are associated with cognitive and sensorimotor performance and explained behavioral variance more effectively than global brain age. These results suggest that regional brain age patterns reflect fundamental principles of cortical organization and behavior.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08228-z

Rights

© The Author(s) 2025

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

APA Citation

Riccardi, N., Teghipco, A., Newman-Norlund, S., Newman-Norlund, R., Rangus, I., Rorden, C., Fridriksson, J., & Bonilha, L. (2025). Distinct brain age gradients across the adult lifespan reflect diverse neurobiological hierarchies. Communications Biology, 8, 802. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08228-z

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