How aging brain cells relate to brain structure

Brain cellular senescence signatures were linked to brain structure, especially volume-related features in excitatory neurons and microglia.

This integrative neuroimaging and molecular expression analysis used prefrontal cortex tissue from neurosurgery patients and replicated cell-type-specific signatures in independent datasets, including a brain gene expression dataset from individuals below 5 years of age.

The work maps molecular correlations across datasets rather than showing that senescence directly causes brain atrophy or developmental brain-structure differences.