Biological heart and brain ageing in subjects with cardiovascular diseases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: The heart-brain axis hypothesis suggests a bidirectional connection between the brain and the heart with relevant implications in health and disease. Cardiovascular diseases have been empirically linked to an increased risk of neurological diseases. However, it remains unclear to what extent different cardiovascular diseases affect brain health quantitatively across subjects and if that is associated with the extent the heart is affected by a disease. Therefore, this study aims to explore how cardiovascular diseases affect biological ageing of the brain and heart by quantifying the brain age gap (BAG) and the heart age gap (HAG) and relating the two to each other. Methods: This study used data from UK Biobank participants with available T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, cardiac MRI-derived features, as well as pulse wave analysis cardiac measurements. This dataset included 7,500 healthy females and 6,684 healthy males. The data from healthy subjects was used to train biological brain age prediction machine learning models. For BAG computation, a convolutional neural network was trained based on the MRI data, while a CatBoost model was trained for HAG analyses based on the tabulated cardiac features. Individuals with cardiovascular diseases (F = 2,304, M = 2,925) in the UK Biobank were categorized using Phecodes and split based on sex and used to calculate the HAG and BAG for further analyses. Results: In 36 sex-specific cardiovascular disease groups, 24 showed significant differences from healthy subjects in the BAG and HAG distributions, whereas no strong correlations between the BAG and HAG distributions within disease groups were found. However, some diseases, such as hypotension and cardiac conduction disorders, showed sex-specific differences. Discussion: This study demonstrates that the combined use of HAG and BAG biomarkers provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between cardiovascular and neurological ageing. The significant differences observed in disease groups, while lacking a strong correlation between the BAG and HAG, questions the generalizability of the heart-brain axis theory with respect to age gap biomarkers, suggesting potentially heterogeneous aging processes of the two systems that warrant further investigation in future work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".