Longitudinal brain-age predictions comprising long-duration spaceflight missions
Our study investigates the effects of long-duration spaceflight on brain aging in spacefarers using structural MRI and machine learning models. Pre-, post-, and follow-up scans of ROS cosmonauts ESA astronauts, and matched Earth-bounding controls were analyzed. We found a considerable difference between the spacefareres and the control group, especially in the ESA cohorts (ß = 0.63). In the ROS cohorts, we observed a difference between the pre- and post-flight scans. A post-hoc analysis revealed that the pre-flight brain age delta was 0.842 years less than the immediate post-flight brain age delta after long-duration spaceflight. All three machine learning models showed good to excellent intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) between the two consecutive MRI sessions. Our findings suggest that long-duration spaceflight may have an effect on human brain aging as observed from MRI.
Authors
- Felix Hoffstaedter (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7163-3110)
- Peter zu Eulenburg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3729-4570)
- Darius A. Gerlach (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7044-6065)
- Ben Jeurissen
- Steven Jillings (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7298-8925)
- Shammi More (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1272-217X)
- Angelique Van Ombergen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3977-4279)
- Lyudmila Makovskaya
- Ilya Rukavishnikov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1003-9219)
- Kaustubh R. Patil (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0289-5480)
- Alexandra Riabova
- Inna Nosikova
- Floris L. Wuyts
- Ekaterina Pechenkova
- Ge Tang
- Viktor Petrovichev
- Elena Tomilovskaya
Institutions
- National Research University Higher School of Economics (RU)
- University of Antwerp (BE)
- Lomonosov Moscow State University (RU)
- European Space Agency (FR)
- Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR) (DE)
- LMU Klinikum (DE)
- Institute of Biomedical Problems (RU)
- German Center for Lung Research (DE)
- Moscow State University (TJ)
- Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (DE)
- European Space Research and Technology Centre (NL)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Microgravity
- Published
- 2026-02-18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41526-026-00575-3
- Primary Topic
- Spaceflight effects on biology
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- European Space Agency
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie
- Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
- Vlaamse regering
- Russian Academy of Sciences