Longitudinal brain-age predictions comprising long-duration spaceflight missions

Tang, Ge; Patil, Kaustubh R.; Hoffstaedter, Felix; More, Shammi; Eickhoff, Simon B.; Jillings, Steven; Jeurissen, Ben; Tomilovskaya, Elena; Gerlach, Darius; Nosikova, Inna; Riabova, Alexandra; Pechenkova, Ekaterina; Petrovichev, Viktor; Rukavishnikov, Ilya; Makovskaya, Lyudmila; Ombergen, Angelique Van; Wuyts, Floris L.; Eulenburg, Peter zu (2026): Longitudinal brain-age predictions comprising long-duration spaceflight missions. npj Microgravity, 12: 24. ISSN 2373-8065

Abstract

Our study investigates the effects of long-duration spaceflight on brain aging in spacefarers using structural MRI and machine learning models. Pre-, post-, and follow-up scans of ROS cosmonauts ESA astronauts, and matched Earth-bounding controls were analyzed. We found a considerable difference between the spacefareres and the control group, especially in the ESA cohorts (ß = 0.63). In the ROS cohorts, we observed a difference between the pre- and post-flight scans. A post-hoc analysis revealed that the pre-flight brain age delta was 0.842 years less than the immediate post-flight brain age delta after long-duration spaceflight. All three machine learning models showed good to excellent intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) between the two consecutive MRI sessions. Our findings suggest that long-duration spaceflight may have an effect on human brain aging as observed from MRI.

• Doc-Type: Article (LMU Hospital)
• Organisational unit (Faculties): 07 Medicine > Medical Center of the University of Munich > Neurological Clinic and Polyclinic with Friedrich Baur Institute
• DFG subject classification of scientific disciplines: Life sciences
• DFG: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 491502892