And if a single imaging test of your brain could reveal not only how you are today, but also predict your risk of disease, frailty, even when your life might end, that's what's behind new technology created by scientists at Harvard, Duke and New Zealand.

It's not futurology or magic, it's cutting-edge neuroscience and artificial intelligence, a tool that can measure the pace of your aging with a degree of precision that can change everything in the fight against dementia, cognitive collapse and age-related diseases.

His name is DunedinPACNI, yes, a strange man, but what you do is revolutionary, based on a single brain MRI scan, it estimates your biological brain age, which can be very different from your age on your ID.

This tool was trained with data from one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in the world, the DunedinPACNI study, which follows over 1000 individuals since birth in the 1970s, this data includes everything from BMI, cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure to gingival recession and lung function.

The idea was simple and bold, use this massive base to create a model that associated brain patterns with the speed at which the person was aging and it worked, DunedinPACNI analyzes brain images of individuals at age 45 and based on them can predict the risk of cognitive decline, dementia and physical frailty decades earlier.

Tests showed that people with faster brain aging were 60% more likely to develop dementia, along with 18% higher risks of chronic diseases and up to 40% more likely to die in the same period, compared to those who age slowly. The examination even revealed an accelerated reduction in the hippocampus, a region linked to memory, as if the brain was gradually turning off before symptoms even appear.

The implication of this is immense, if we can predict aging decades in advance, we can intervene long before the breakdown sets in, diet, exercise, cognitive stimuli, everything can be tailored in a personalized way based not only on genetics or lifestyle, but on what the brain is saying in real time.

The idea is to make this test a routine tool in clinics, allowing doctors to accurately identify who is at risk of aging too quickly and do something about it while there is still time.