According to the chart, the only thing that increases in late adulthood is ventricular volume. Interesting.<p>"An increase in ventricle size is associated with degenerative brain disease and gait."<p><a href="https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/neurology-neurosurgery/news/ventricular-volume-clinical-utility-for-assessing-current-and-future-cognition-and-gait/mac-20502067" rel="nofollow">https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/neurology-n...</a><p>Nice. Hopefully this puts to rest "your brain gets better as it ages" nonsense. There has to be a correlation between the physical changes of the brain as we age and the decline in cognition.<p>Edit: The researchers website with real time charts, male/female data/breakdown, etc<p><a href="https://brainchart.shinyapps.io/brainchart/" rel="nofollow">https://brainchart.shinyapps.io/brainchart/</a>
<i>Seidlitz has amassed more than 120,000 brain scans — the largest collection of its kind — to create the first comprehensive growth charts for brain development.</i><p>The unusually large sample size alone makes this an important body of work.
Age will eventually catch up, but meditation, aerobic exercise, good sleeping pattern, certain video games, good tangible social connections, exploring novel things are shown to moderate the decline. While stress/tension, sedentary lifestyle and most importantly loneliness accelerate the decline.
I seem to recall a number of "$X is bad for you because it shrinks the brain" articles. Wonder how many will be reviewed and find that $X is <i>still</i> bad for you despite whatever effect they alleged being even less likely to be meaningful.<p>that's the bitch about "bespoke science," you can report that "the Science says" whatever you like (if you can afford it) but then it requires maintenance to make sure it keeps saying that.
This is a very impressive data set. I'm curious about the statistical techniques the scientists used to normalize the measurements across different imaging machines. Worth digging into for the stats-inclined.
It's interesting how many folks seem kinda obsessed with brain size...<p>Does anyone know of a company (or university, govt. agency, etc.) which hired or promoted on the basis of "physically larger brains perform better" - and was actually successful with that? Probably using some rough cranial measurements as a proxy for brain size, vs. MRI's.<p>I'd bet that the real-world performance of that strategy would be considerably worse than random chance, due to various knock-on effects.
If anyone is interested in the pdf: <a href="https://oa.mg/work/10.1101/2021.06.08.447489" rel="nofollow">https://oa.mg/work/10.1101/2021.06.08.447489</a>
I thought MRI had no absolute spatial scale unlike a CT or X-ray does when a known dimension radio-opaque reference marker object is put into the field of view. Am I mistaken here?