Associations between a biological marker of resilience, brain pathology, and cognitive functioning

Dementia is the end‐product of decades of accumulating neuropathology. Resilience mechanisms can help sustaining the brain structure (brain maintenance, BM) and/or compensating for neuropathology (cognitive reserve, CR), preserving cognition. Measuring such mechanisms, however, has been challenging with traditional approaches as they fail to capture the complex biological dimension. Using deep learning (DL), we recently developed a biological measure of brain age from raw brain MRI images. Here, we tested whether differences between predicted brain age and the chronological age (PBA‐CA) can be used as marker of BM/CR following the latest framework from the NIH‐supported Collaboratory on Research Definitions for Reserve and Resilience.