Beijing Aging Brain Rejuvenation Initiative: aging with grace

With the aging of the population, diseases related to cognitive impairment have caused great harm to society and families. Objective evaluation of the level of cognitive aging and clarification of the process and neural mechanism of cognitive aging would provide a basis for forewarning and treatment in the early stages of disease. Thus, there is a necessity to establish large-scale, high-standard community-based elderly brain health cohorts. Detailed in this paper, the Beijing Aging Brain Rejuvenation Initiative (BABRI) project, which launched in 2008 by Beijing Normal University and aimed to build a database focusing on cognitive aging and brain health, encompasses 10000 samples from elderly individuals in local communities and over 5000 multimodal neuroimaging cases. After ten years of unremitting efforts, the BABRI database has taken shape with more than 7000 community-based cases for individuals above 50 years of age. Ever since, BABRI has been used to preliminarily establish cognitive aging norms for native Chinese senior citizens, revealing the incidence and risk factors for mild cognitive impairment and systematically identifying their specific neural characteristics that may potentially serve as biomarkers for early detection before the onset of disease. Based on social needs and international trends in neuroscience, the implementation of large community-based elderly brain health cohort studies and the establishment of a multidimensional database to document the patterns of cognitive aging would provide high quality and innovative resources for elderly brain health promotion, major brain disease prevention and development of related researches, and play a key role in the implementation of new projects related to brain science in China.