Hydrocortisone and testosterone are just two of 13 drugs and supplements that could lessen the impact of genes that accelerate brain ageing
By Chris Simms
12 March 2025
Our actual age can differ from the age our brain appears to be
Julien Tromeur / Alamy
Seven genes have been linked to particularly fast ageing of the brain – but 13 drugs and supplements might reduce their effects.
The activity of many genes contributes to the difference between our actual age and the biological age of our brains, defined by how old our cells indicate we are, which creates what is known as a brain age gap.
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To find genes that accelerate brain ageing and widen this gap, Zhengxing Huang at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues trained a deep-learning model called 3D-ViT on some medical records and used others to check it gave accurate responses.
They then used it to analyse data from nearly 39,000 people who had health, genetic and lifestyle information, along with biological samples, stored in the UK Biobank. These participants were 64 years old, on average, and about half were women.
3D-ViT identified signatures in the participants’ MRI scans that could be used to estimate their biological brain age. Signs of accelerated ageing particularly appeared in brain regions known as the lentiform nucleus, which is involved in cognition, such as attention and working memory, and the posterior limb of the internal capsule, which connects various regions to the brain’s cerebral cortex – used for thought and language processing.