Young adults reporting psychotic experiences have older-looking brains, finds new research by an international team.
Researchers from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain, the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre and University College London used brain imaging studies to uncover how psychotic experiences, such as brief hallucinations or delusion-like thoughts in otherwise healthy individuals, might be associated with differences in brain age in young people.
Dr Pedro Luque Laguna, Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre, said: "Brain age is a measurement that estimates how old a brain looks in MRI scans using machine-learning models."
If a brain looks older than the person's chronological age, this is known as the brain-age gap.
"Previously, research has found that brains look older than expected in conditions like chronic migraine, schizophrenia and hypertension. Psychotic experiences affect around 7% of young people and are linked to structural brain variation. These experiences are relatively common and usually brief, and do not necessarily indicate mental illness, but their link to brain ageing has been unclear. We wanted to examine the association between psychotic experiences and the brain-age gap from early to later young adulthood."
The researchers trained a machine learning model using over 2,600 brain scans to predict a person's 'brain age' from an MRI scan. They measured the difference between the estimated brain age to a person's real age, to measure the brain-age gap.
They applied the model to MRI scans from hundreds of young adults in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC; 'Children of the 90s') database - analysing 245 20-year-old participants (124 of whom had reported psychotic experiences), 279 30-year-old participants (69 of whom had reported psychotic experiences). 113 participants were scanned at both ages.
The scans revealed that at age 20, individuals who had experienced psychotic-like symptoms showed brains that appeared significantly older than their chronological age. These results suggest altered brain development in early adulthood, however the change appears to be temporary.
By age 30, the differences in brain-age gap between people with and without psychotic experiences was no longer statistically significant, which could reflect typical brain development or remission of psychotic experiences, but the mechanism is uncertain.
The researchers also observed a trend toward larger brain-age gaps with increasing severity of psychotic experiences.
These findings suggest that there may be differences in the developmental trajectory of the brain in young people who report psychotic-like experiences.
Professor Derek Jones, Director of Cardiff University's Brain Research Imaging Centre, said: "At earlier ages, their brain structure appears more mature compared to peers, but this difference becomes less apparent later in young adulthood. This pattern is consistent with a variation in the timing or pace of brain development, rather than a persistent or progressive form of brain ageing. Larger and more diverse studies will be needed to confirm these observations and to understand what they might mean for long-term outcomes."
Increased brain-age gap in young adults with psychotic experiences , published in Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science
