Abstract
Music-making is a widespread leisure activity that has garnered interest over the years due to its effect on brain and cognitive development and its potential as a rehabilitative therapy of brain dysfunction. We investigated whether music-making has a potential age-protecting effect on the brain. For this, we studied anatomical magnetic resonance images in professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non-musicians. For each subject, we calculated a so-called BrainAGE score which corresponds to the discrepancy (in years) between chronological age and the ‘‘age of the brain’’, with negative values reflecting an age-decelerating brain and positive values an age-accelerating brain, respectively. The index of ‘‘brain age’’ was estimated using a machine-learning algorithm that was trained in a large independent sample to identify neuroanatomical correlates of brain-aging. Compared to non-musicians, musicians overall had lower BrainAGE scores, with amateur musicians having the lowest scores suggesting that music-making has an age-decelerating effect on the brain.