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What your brain score says about your body
Simple tool can be used to identify risk factors for cancer and heart disease too, says new study
A “scorecard” designed to assess a person’s risk of developing brain-related conditions works similarly for heart disease and the three most common types of cancer, according to a new Mass General Brigham study published in Family Practice.
The McCance Brain Care Score, developed at Mass General Brigham, is a list designed to assess modifiable risk factors that influence brain health. The scorecard also serves as a practical framework to help individuals identify meaningful, achievable lifestyle changes that support brain — and possibly systemic — health. Previous studies showed that a higher score, indicating better brain care, associates with a lower risk of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression.
“While the McCance Brain Care Score was originally developed to address modifiable risk factors for brain diseases, we have also found it’s associated with the incidence of cardiovascular disease and common cancers,” said senior author Sanjula Singh of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “These findings reinforce the idea that brain disease, heart disease, and cancer share common risk factors and that by taking better care of your brain, you may also be supporting the health of your heart and body as a whole simultaneously.”
“These findings reinforce the idea that brain disease, heart disease, and cancer share common risk factors.”
Neurological diseases such as stroke, dementia, and late-life depression are often driven by a combination of modifiable risk factors. Similarly, cardiovascular diseases — including ischemic heart disease, stroke, and heart failure — and the three most common cancers worldwide (lung, colorectal, and breast cancer) share many of these risk factors. At least 80 percent of cardiovascular disease cases and 50 percent of cancer cases are attributable to modifiable behaviors such as poor nutrition, physical inactivity, smoking, excessive alcohol use, elevated blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, as well as psychosocial factors like stress and social isolation.
Given this overlap, researchers used data from the UK Biobank to analyze health outcomes in 416,370 individuals aged 40 to 69 years. They found that a 5-point higher Brain Care Score at baseline was associated with a 43 percent lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a median follow-up of 12½ years. For cancer, a 5-point increase in Brain Care Score was associated with a 31 percent lower incidence of lung, colorectal, and breast cancer.
The authors acknowledged several limitations. First, while the findings reveal strong associations, the study does not establish causality — although prior evidence suggests that some individual components of the Brain Care Score, such as smoking, physical activity, and blood pressure control, have causal links to specific outcomes. Second, because the UK Biobank includes only participants aged 40 to 69 at enrollment, the findings may not generalize to younger or older populations. Lastly, while the score provides a broad, accessible measure of brain health, it is not designed as a disease-specific predictive model.
“The goal of the McCance Brain Care Score is to empower individuals to take small, meaningful steps toward better brain health,” said lead author Jasper Senff, who conducted this work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Singh Lab within the Brain Care Labs at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Taking better care of your brain by making progress on your Brain Care Score may also be linked to broader health benefits, including a lower likelihood of heart disease and cancer.”
“Primary care providers around the world are under growing pressure to manage complex health needs within limited time,” said Singh. “A simple, easy-to-use tool like the McCance Brain Care Score holds enormous promise — not only for supporting brain health, but also for helping to address modifiable risk factors for a broader range of chronic diseases in a practical, time-efficient way.”
Funding for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health and American Heart Association.
