Brain aging is like a photograph slowly fading: first the barely visible details grow pale, and only later does the image lose its sharpness. The COFITAGE project has taken a detailed snapshot of the brains of 101 healthy people aged 50-69 to capture those first changes. Each participant went through several procedures: brain scans using two methods (PET and MRI), two nights of sleep recording, a genetic test and a battery of memory and attention tasks. Such data used to be collected separately, but here they are combined in a single dataset.
What did the data show? In 100 people, the buildup of amyloid protein, which is linked to Alzheimer's, was measured, and in 67, the buildup of tau protein. MRI revealed brain structure down to a grain-of-sand-sized voxel, and sleep recording showed how the brain rests. Two years later, 65 people repeated the memory tasks, and now it is possible to compare whose results changed. All the data are openly available, so any researcher can use them.
Why does this matter? Previously there was no dataset that combined molecular, structural, physiological and cognitive measures in the same healthy people. Now it is possible to study how protein buildup, sleep quality, genes and brain reserve are connected. This will help explain why some people with pathology keep a clear mind while others do not. In the future, the data will be expanded with recordings of the brain's electrical activity and observations of participants over seven years, which will make it possible to see how the brain changes over time.
COFITAGE participants slept in the laboratory two nights in a row to rule out the first-night effect, and their sleep during the week before recording was tracked with an actigraph and a diary. Such a rigorous protocol is rarely found in neuroimaging cohorts.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.