PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Jingtao Wang AU - Peter Kochunov AU - Hemalatha Sampath AU - Kathryn S. Hatch AU - Meghann C. Ryan AU - Fuzhong Xue AU - Jahanshad Neda AU - Thompson Paul AU - Britta Hahn AU - James Gold AU - James Waltz AU - L. Elliot Hong AU - Shuo Chen TI - White matter brain aging In Relationship to Schizophrenia and Its Cognitive Deficit AID - 10.1101/2020.10.19.344879 DP - 2020 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2020.10.19.344879 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/20/2020.10.19.344879.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/20/2020.10.19.344879.full AB - We hypothesized that cerebral white matter deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) are driven in part by accelerated white matter aging and are associated with cognitive deficits. We used machine learning model to predict individual age from diffusion tensor imaging features and calculated the delta age (Δage) as the difference between predicted and chronological age. Through this approach, we translated multivariate white matter imaging features into an age-scaled metric and used it to test the temporal trends of accelerated aging-related white matter deficit in SZ and its association with the cognition. Followed feature selection, a machine learning model was trained with fractional anisotropy values in 34 of 43 tracts on a training set consisted of 107 healthy controls (HC). The brain age of 166 SZs and 107 HCs in the testing set were calculated using this model. Then, we examined the SZ-HC group effect on Δage and whether this effect was moderated by chronological age using the regression spline model. The results showed that Δage was significantly elevated in the age >30 group in patients (p < 0.001) but not in age ⩽ 30 group (p = 0.364). Δage in patients was significantly and negatively associated with both working memory (β = −0.176, p = 0.007) and processing speed (β = −0.519, p = 0.035) while adjusting sex and chronological age. Overall, these findings indicate that the Δage is elevated in SZs and become significantly from middle life stage; the increase of Δage in SZs is associated with the decline neurocognitive performance.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.