The study has followed the lives of more than 1000 babies born in Dunedin between April 1, 1972 and March 31, 1973, and researched their health and development to answer questions about how people’s early years affect mental and physical health as they age.
Over the next few years, more than 850 Dunedin Study participants are expected to trickle back to Dunedin to have MRI brain scans as part of the study’s Brain Imaging Project.
Project co-ordinator Dr David Ireland said the participants had structural MRIs and functional MRIs done about seven years ago.
This time, they would have more in-depth structural scans done, to see how their brains had changed with the ageing process, he said.
"We have a scan of their brain from age 45 and we will be able to compare them to the scans that we’re doing now at age 52, roughly.
"The idea is that it might tell us about how the brain ages when we take that MRI data and combine it with all the other data we have from the participants over their whole lifetimes."
The project also aimed to improve how future medical science could predict, treat and even prevent the onset of brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, he said.
"The advantage of doing what we’re doing is that we’re looking at brain scans done relatively early on in the study members’ lives, in comparison to many other studies of ageing where people tend to look at participants who are already old.
"If you really want to understand the things that contribute to whether someone ages well or doesn’t age well, you really need to start looking earlier in their life.
"We know that the processes that contribute to how a person ages and how their brain ages start much, much earlier in life than old age.
"So by getting in early, we can hopefully shed a bit of light on the earlier processes which allows us to predict who might have problems later in life."
Study participants had started coming back from around the world in March for their MRI scans, and it was hoped they would all be scanned by the end of 2025, Dr Ireland said.
