Prediction of dementia risk from multimodal repeated measures: The added value of brain MRI biomarkers

The utility of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for predicting dementia is debated. We evaluated the added value of repeated brain MRI, including atrophy and cerebral small vessel disease markers, for dementia prediction. We conducted a landmark competing risk analysis in 1716 participants of the French population-based Three-City Study to predict the 5-year risk of dementia using repeated measures of 41 predictors till year 4 of follow-up. Brain MRI markers improved significantly the individual prediction of dementia after accounting for demographics, health measures, and repeated measures of cognition and functional dependency (area under the ROC curve [95% CI] improved from 0.80 [0.79 to 0.82] to 0.83 [0.81 to 0.84]). Nonetheless, accounting for the change over time through repeated MRIs had little impact on predictive abilities. These results highlight the importance of multimodal analysis to evaluate the added predictive abilities of repeated brain MRI for dementia and offer new insights into the predictive performances of various MRI markers.Highlights We evaluated whether repeated brain volumes and cSVD markers improve dementia prediction. The 5-year prediction of dementia is slightly improved when considering brain MRI markers. Measures of hippocampus volume are the main MRI predictors of dementia. Adjusted on cognition, repeated MRI has poor added value over single MRI for dementia prediction. We utilized a longitudinal analysis that considers error-and-missing-prone predictors, and competing death.