The LBL Brain Age Index estimates the modifiable portion of your brain's age across six evidence-based domains, visualized on an animated radar and a brain-age timeline. It turns the science of dementia prevention into a number you can actually move. LBL-original, grounded in the 2024 Lancet Commission and brain-age-gap neuroimaging research.
Twenty-five questions across six domains. As you answer, the panel beside you updates in real time, so you can see exactly how each part of your life moves the number. There are no right answers, only honest ones.
This is the modifiable portion of your brain's age, not a scan. The number you can move is the number that matters.
Your archetype will appear here after you answer all 25 items.
This shows where your brain sits relative to your calendar age, and how far an optimized version of your current profile could pull it back.
The factors currently adding the most to your brain age, ordered by impact. This is where effort pays back fastest.
Your score showed you the gap. The Brain Blueprint is the report that closes it: a domain-by-domain deep read, your levers ranked by exactly how many years each one is costing you, a week-by-week 12-week protocol built around your specific result, the science behind your numbers, and what to watch for. Generated for your profile, not generic advice.
The LBL Brain Age Index estimates the modifiable portion of brain aging from 25 self-reported factors across six domains. It is built on two distinct bodies of evidence: the 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, which quantifies how much of dementia risk traces to factors you can change, and the brain-age-gap neuroimaging literature, which measures how far a brain's apparent age can diverge from its calendar age.
This section explains what brain age means, how the six domains are weighted, how your gap and recoverable years are computed, what the six archetypes represent, and, just as importantly, what this estimate cannot tell you. The instrument is in active development; convergent-validity work against published brain-age models is planned but not yet complete.
Over the past decade, researchers have trained machine-learning models to estimate a person's age from a brain scan alone, using features like cortical thickness, tissue volumes, and white-matter integrity. When such a model is shown a new brain, it predicts an age. The difference between that predicted age and the person's real, calendar age is the brain-age gap (often abbreviated BAG). A positive gap means the brain looks older than the birthday; a negative gap means it looks younger.
The gap is interesting because it is not random. Across large cohorts (the 2025 Communications Medicine analysis drew on UK Biobank, ADNI, and PPMI data totaling more than 40,000 brains), a larger positive gap is associated with worse cognitive performance, higher rates of neuropsychiatric conditions, and faster future decline. The best current models predict chronological age with a mean absolute error of roughly 2.4 to 2.5 years, which is why this tool always expresses your result with a margin, never as a single false-precise number.
A brain-age model does not diagnose anything. It produces a single summary number: does this brain look older or younger than its years, and by how much? The value of that number is that a meaningful slice of it responds to how you live.
Synthesizing Cole & Franke (2017) on brain-age prediction with the 2024 Lancet Commission on modifiable risk.The Brain Age Index combines two questions that the research literature answers separately. The first, from the dementia-prevention field, is: which factors causally raise the risk of cognitive decline, and how much of the population-level risk could be removed if each were addressed? The second, from the neuroimaging field, is: how much of a measured brain-age gap actually tracks with those same factors?
The 2024 Lancet Commission identified 14 modifiable risk factors that together account for around 45% of dementia cases worldwide, assigning each a population-attributable fraction (PAF), the share of cases theoretically preventable by eliminating that factor. The 2024 update added two factors to the previous list: elevated LDL cholesterol in midlife and untreated vision loss in later life. The largest single contributors include hearing loss, less education, and high LDL. These PAFs set the relative weights in this tool: a factor the Commission weights heavily moves your estimate more.
The brain-age-gap literature supplies the honesty. Studies that regress measured brain-age gaps on lifestyle and cardiometabolic factors consistently find that those factors explain a limited share of the variance, in the range of up to about 21% (a 2025 Rotterdam-based analysis is representative). The rest is genetics, early-life development, chance, and biological processes no questionnaire can capture. This is the single most important caveat in the entire tool, and it is the reason every figure here is deliberately scaled down.
The 25 items map to six domains. Each domain is scored 0 to 100 (higher is healthier) and contributes both to your overall brain-health score and, through its factors' year-weights, to your brain-age gap. Below, each domain is shown with its approximate evidentiary weight and the mechanisms that justify it.
The vascular system and the brain are inseparable. Chronically elevated blood pressure stiffens and damages the small vessels that perfuse deep white matter, and that hypoperfusion shows up on imaging as accelerated aging. Midlife hypertension is one of the most robust risk factors in the entire literature, and the 2024 Commission added high LDL cholesterol as a distinct contributor. Central adiposity, measured by waist-to-hip ratio rather than BMI, predicts brain-age gaps better than overall weight, which is why this tool asks about waist, not pounds.
This is the most modifiable domain, and the changes here have the fastest measurable effects. Aerobic activity improves endothelial function and cerebral blood flow within weeks, well before any weight change, and physical inactivity carries a meaningful PAF in the Commission's accounting. Smoking accelerates vascular aging directly; heavy alcohol use is independently associated with brain volume loss. Because lifestyle factors drive the cardiometabolic domain too, gains here tend to compound across the profile.
Sleep sits at the center of brain maintenance. The relationship between sleep duration and brain aging is U-shaped: both short and very long sleep are associated with worse outcomes, with the sweet spot around seven to eight hours. Across cohorts totaling more than 25,000 people, suboptimal sleep independently predicts one to three years of additional brain aging. The mechanism drawing the most attention is glymphatic clearance, the brain's overnight waste-removal process, which runs most efficiently during deep sleep. Untreated sleep apnea is an independent, and highly treatable, risk.
Reserve is the brain's buffer. Education, occupational complexity, mentally demanding leisure, and speaking multiple languages all build a capacity to absorb damage before it shows as decline, through richer dendritic branching and more flexible network recruitment. Less education carries one of the largest PAFs in the Commission's list. Reserve is slow to build and slow to lose, so in this tool it functions less as a fast lever and more as the asset that determines how much of your underlying load is currently being masked.
The relationship between mood and brain health is bidirectional. Depression is both a risk factor for and an early sign of cognitive decline, and it carries a distinct PAF in the Commission's framework. Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which is associated with hippocampal volume loss over time. On the protective side, a strong sense of purpose is independently associated with slower cognitive decline in longitudinal cohorts. This domain also matters for adherence: stable mood and clear purpose are the conditions under which sustained behavior change actually happens.
This domain is dominated by hearing, which carries the single largest PAF in the 2024 Commission. Untreated hearing loss increases cognitive load and accelerates social withdrawal, both of which strain the brain; crucially, it is highly correctable. The 2024 update added untreated vision loss. Social isolation, traumatic brain injury, and long-term air-pollution exposure round out the domain. Because these factors are often overlooked, this is frequently where the most surprising and most fixable gains hide.
Each answer you give maps to two things: a year contribution (how many years of brain aging that factor adds or subtracts) and a domain sub-score (0 to 1, how healthy that factor is within its domain). The year contributions are anchored to the BAG literature and the Commission's PAFs, then deliberately kept conservative.
Three adjustments make the estimate honest rather than dramatic. First, an age-conditional salience multiplier reflects that the same factor matters differently at different ages: cardiometabolic factors peak in midlife, while sensory factors carry more weight later. Second, a global conservatism factor of 0.70 scales every contribution down, in direct acknowledgment of the 21% variance ceiling. Third, the final gap is bounded so that the tool never claims an implausibly large effect from self-report alone.
Your recoverable years figure is the sum of the brain-aging years currently being added by factors within your control. It represents the upper bound of what addressing those factors could plausibly return, not a promise. Non-modifiable factors (age, biological sex, family history) shift your baseline but are explicitly excluded from the recoverable total, because the number is meant to point only at what you can act on.
Two numbers determine your archetype: your cognitive reserve (high or low) and your modifiable risk load (low, moderate, or high). The archetype is a quick read on the shape of your brain-health profile, not a diagnosis. It also drives care-aware routing: profiles showing several strained systems at once are met with a gentler, wellbeing-first framing.
The Brain Age Index is an educational decision-support tool. It is not a brain scan, a clinical or diagnostic assessment, or a prediction of whether you will develop any condition. It estimates the modifiable slice of brain aging from self-report, and self-report plus lifestyle explains no more than about a fifth of measured brain-age variance. Two people with identical answers can have genuinely different brains.
What the tool does well is make the direction and priority of your modifiable risk legible: where your effort would pay back fastest, and which strong domains are quietly protecting you. If any answer here suggests a clinical issue, untreated apnea, very high blood pressure, persistent low mood, please treat that as a prompt to see a qualified clinician, not as a verdict from a web tool.
If you reference this tool in a paper, presentation, or educational setting, please use one of the standard citation formats below. The LBL Brain Age Index is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 — free for educational and non-commercial use with attribution. For commercial licensing or research collaboration, contact LifeByLogic directly. See the science section for the foundational literature this instrument synthesizes.
Every domain weight and mechanism in this tool traces to peer-reviewed research. The core sources are listed below.
The honest answers to what people ask most about brain age and this tool.
No. It is an estimate of the modifiable portion of brain aging, built from your answers to 25 evidence-based questions. A real brain-age measurement requires an MRI scan and a trained model. This tool tells you, based on how you live, roughly how much your habits are adding to or subtracting from your brain's apparent age, and where the leverage is. Treat it as a structured mirror, not a scan.
The figure is deliberately conservative. Self-reported lifestyle and cardiometabolic factors explain no more than about 21% of measured brain-age variance, so the tool scales its estimates down accordingly and reports them with a margin rather than as a single exact number. It is best read as a direction and a priority order, not a precise forecast.
A brain age at or below your calendar age, and a brain-health score above roughly 70, both point to a well-resourced profile. But the most useful number for most people is recoverable years: how much brain aging your controllable factors are currently adding. A high recoverable figure is not bad news, it is the opposite, because it means a large share of your gap is within your power to change.
They are the sum of the brain-aging years currently being added by factors you can change, such as sleep, blood pressure, activity, and hearing. They represent the upper bound of what addressing those factors could plausibly return, not a guarantee. Non-modifiable factors like age and family history are excluded from this number on purpose.
The modifiable portion can. Many of the factors here, blood pressure, sleep, activity, hearing correction, respond within weeks to months, and the brain-age-gap literature shows these factors track with measurable differences. Reserve-related factors like education change slowly. Brain aging is a long game; retaking the assessment every three to six months is the right cadence to see what moves.
Yes. The entire calculation runs locally in your browser. Your answers are never transmitted to a server. If you choose to purchase the optional Brain Blueprint report, only the computed results needed to generate it are sent, and only at that point.
No. It is educational decision support. It cannot diagnose dementia, mild cognitive impairment, or any condition, and it is not validated for diagnosis. If your answers raise a clinical flag, such as untreated sleep apnea or very high blood pressure, please see a qualified clinician. This tool is a starting point for thinking, not a substitute for care.
This tool is free and gives you your profile on screen: your brain age, six domain scores, archetype, and ranked levers. The Brain Blueprint ($24.99) turns that profile into a personalized 14-page report, with a domain-by-domain deep read, a 12-week protocol built around your specific results, and the science behind your numbers. Both are educational, not medical advice.