Temporalis muscle biomarkers from routine brain MRI and risk of dementia in two independent cohorts.

AI / informaticsAlzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association· Aug 2026

Temporalis muscle biomarkers from routine brain MRI and risk of dementia in two independent cohorts.

Kamyar Moradi, Roham Hadidchi, Amyn Majbri … Shadpour Demehri

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Medical Imaging AIAI / informaticsPrognosisQ1IF 11.9

Higher temporalis muscle radiomic scores on magnetic resonance imaging were linked to greater dementia risk.

Temporalis muscle biomarkers from routine brain MRI and risk of dementia in two independent cohorts.

Kamyar Moradi … Shadpour Demehri

Alzheimer's & dementia · Aug 2026

Background

Skeletal muscle loss is associated with cognitive decline, but whether neuroimaging-derived muscle characteristics predict incident dementia remains unclear.

Methods

We evaluated associations of deep learning-derived temporalis muscle (temporalis muscle) cross-sectional area (cross-sectional area) and radiomic texture features from baseline T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (magnetic resonance imaging) with incident dementia in dementia-free participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) (n = 750) and the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) study (n = 532).

n = 750

Results

higher scores meant greater dementia risk

1.32HR per

ADNI

1.64HR per

ARIC

More results

Smaller temporalis muscle cross-sectional area predicted dementia in ADNI but not Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities.

“

Conclusion

DISCUSSION: temporalis muscle texture patterns from routine brain magnetic resonance imaging are associated with dementia risk, supporting temporalis muscle phenotyping as a scalable marker of systemic biological vulnerability.

Temporalis muscle biomarkers from routine brain MRI and risk of dementia in two independent cohorts.

Temporalis muscle biomarkers from routine brain MRI and risk of dementia in two independent cohorts.

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