The difference between a stroke patient's brain age and chronologic age may help clinicians predict which patients are likely to have worse outcomes, a new study found.
Stroke patients with a higher relative brain age (RBA), as measured by MRI, had significantly worse functional outcomes after an ischemic stroke than patients with a lower RBA.
Although more work is needed, researchers say using open source radiomics software to extract features from MRI scans could allow clinicians to better target post-stroke therapy.
Dr Martin Bretzner
"Patients with older-looking brains were less likely to achieve good functional outcomes after stroke," investigator Martin Bretzner, MD, a research fellow in neurology at Harvard Medical School and an interventional neuroradiologist at the Lille University Hospital, told Medscape Medical News. "Maybe we could use relative brain age to select patients to be more aggressive or more attentive with therapy."
The findings were presented today at the European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC) 2022 Annual Meeting in Lyon, France.
Finding the Brain Age Gap
The gap between a person's chronologic age and their brain age has been implicated in earlier studies as a biomarker for risk of dementia, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, and other conditions.
Bretzner and colleagues wanted to know if that brain age gap was also a predictor for outcomes following a stroke.
