You may be 40 years old, but could your brain already be showing signs of accelerated aging? New research involving more than 18,000 people suggests that the answer may depend on much more than genetics or your date of birth.

impairment.

Rather than examining only one lifestyle factor, they investigated 73 country-level physical and social environmental indicators.

These included broader conditions that may shape human health over time.

Scientists refer to the combined influences of environmental exposures and living conditions as

the exposome.

The researchers found that combinations of unfavorable environmental and social conditions were associated with greater differences between estimated brain age and chronological age.

Interestingly, models combining multiple exposures explained substantially more variation in brain-aging measurements than models examining individual exposures separately.

The study also suggestedthat physical