Accelerated Brain Aging in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: Longitudinal Pattern Recognition with White Matter Integrity.

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) initiating long-term effects on white matter integrity resembles brain-aging changes, implying an aging process accelerated by mTBI. This longitudinal study aims to investigate the mTBI-induced acceleration of the brain-aging process by developing a neuroimaging model to predict brain age. The brain-age prediction model was defined using relevance vector regression based on fractional anisotropy from diffusion tensor imaging of 523 healthy individuals. The model was used to estimate the brain-predicted age difference (brain-PAD) between the chronological and estimated brain age in 116 acute mTBI patients and 63 healthy controls. Fifty patients were followed for 6 ∼ 12 months to evaluate the longitudinal changes in brain-PAD. We investigated whether brain-PAD was greater in patients of older age, post-concussion complaints, and apolipoprotein E (APOE) ɛ4 genotype, and whether it had the potential to predict neuropsychological outcomes. The brain-age prediction model predicted brain age accurately (