Visceral Adipose Tissue Shows Stronger Links to both Chronological and MRI Predicted Brain Age Compared to Subcutaneous Adipose Tissue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Brain age - an image derived measure from structural brain images on T1 weighted scans may reveal information on Alzheimer's risk. We have previously shown that increased abdominal adipose tissue relates to brain atrophy. We evaluated the links between abdominal adipose tissue and brain age. METHOD: A total of 1,164 healthy participants from four sites (mean chronological age 55.17 ± 12.37 years, 52% women; 48% men; 39% non-white) were scanned on 1.5T MR machines with a whole-body protocol. Whole body sequences utilized in the quantitative analyses of abdominal fat were coronal T1 were used to segment visceral adipose tissue (VAT) and subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) segmentation. In this process, a nnU-Net model was used for fully supervised segmentation and ITK-SNAP was used for manual annotation. Brain age was computed using a regression-based 3D Simple Fully Convolutional Network. The model was trained on in-house T1-weighted MRI scans collected from 5,500 healthy individuals, aged 18 to 89 years. Brain age gap (BAG) was computed by subtracting chronological age from brain age. Bivariate correlations between VAT and SAT to chronological and brain age were done with partial correlations adjusted for sex with brain age. VAT and SAT were normalized to total abdominal body fat volume. Chronological age was not adjusted for in brain age models to avoid collinearity. RESULT: Mean brain age exceeded chronological age (mean brain age = 56.04 ± 12.65, mean BAG = 0.69) and were highly correlated (r=0.94, p <.001). VAT and SAT were positively related to increased chronological age (VAT: r=0.2780, p = 5.477e-20; r=0.0924, p = 0.002817) and increased brain age (VAT: r=0.2806, p = 2.42e-20; SAT: r=0.0947, p = 0.002189) with VAT being more closely linked to age than SAT. This did not change when adjusting for sex in separate partial correlations between VAT and SAT for brain age (VAT: rp = r=0.2948, p = 2.247e-22; SAT: r=0.1070, p = 0.0005353). No statistically significant link was noted with VAT, SAT, and BAG. CONCLUSION: Both VAT and SAT are linked to chronological and brain age with VAT being more strongly linked. VAT may be a key target for modifying brain age and Alzheimer's risk.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".