Big thanks to Nature Aging for the shoutout! Curious to dig deeper? We’ve posted a thread with more details and background on the work 👇

Thread: bsky.app/profile/pjaw...

Great opportunity to reshare the Big Five facets correlation plot I made earlier, showing how the synthetic data from synthpop matches the original dataset (n = 468). Cheers! :-P

Thanks for the question! Indeed, our phenome scan (Table S2) revealed links with wrist-accelerometer traits — notably fraction acceleration ≤ 1 mg (inactive time) and no-wear bias–adjusted acceleration maximum (peak movement) over 7 days, plus self-report measures like "walking for pleasure". 🏃‍♀️

🙌 Thanks to everyone involved — especially colleagues at @humboldtuni.bsky.social, @mpicbs.bsky.social, and @unileipzig.bsky.social for their support and collaboration.

📚 Take-home:
Brain aging is a complex but quantifiable trait shaped by genes and environment. Our findings suggest that healthier lifestyles are linked to younger-looking brains. Key genes like MAPT and pathways in immunity and neurogenesis give us clues for keeping brains younger for longer.

We estimate that ~9–11k common genetic variants contribute to BAG — a level of polygenicity similar to height, but much lower than neuroticism. That’s good news: discovery power scales well, and with ~1 M participants (phew — still quite a way to go!) we could capture most common genetic influences.

⚡ Mendelian randomization suggests causal effects:
Higher blood pressure and type 2 diabetes drive accelerated brain aging — each 1 SD increase in blood pressure corresponds to ~0.5 years older brain age.

🔗 Genetic correlations show broad overlap with lifestyle, mental, physical, and socioeconomic traits:
⬆️ blood pressure, diabetes, drinking, smoking, depressed mood
⬇️ lung function, cognition, longevity, education, income
🧠 Brain aging lies at the intersection of body, mind, and environment.

🔎 Pathway analyses show enrichment for:
• Immune and viral response genes
• Neurogenesis and axon development
• Small GTPase binding – key regulators of cellular timing mechanisms

Brain aging is not just “wear and tear” — it’s tied to immune and developmental biology.

🧬 A new polygenic score for BAG explains ~10% of variance — a big leap from previous ~2%. Still, prediction in non-European ancestries remains limited, highlighting the urgent need for more diverse genomic data.

💥 We identified 59 genomic loci, including 39 never linked before to brain aging. The strongest signal is at MAPT (tau) — a well-known Alzheimer’s gene — confirming its central role in brain structural aging.

🧠 The brain age gap (BAG) = your brain’s predicted MRI age minus your actual age.

A higher BAG means your brain looks “older” than expected. We show BAG is substantially heritable (~23–29% due to common variants), meaning genes do play a big role — but environment and lifestyle matter too.

The funnel plot suggests a formidable publication bias—excellent material for class discussions! You can find my R script on OSF (osf.io/u6hsn/) and adapt it for your own purposes. 2/2
#OpenScience #Reproducibility #BehavioralGenetics