LCBC
Center for Lifespan Changes in Brain and Cognition (LCBC) longitudinal sample, University of Oslo
In-house longitudinal lifespan cohort from Oslo: 4,352 MRI scans of 2,017 cognitively healthy participants aged 4 to 93 at recruitment, on Siemens 1.5 T and 3 T scanners, with DTI and amyloid PET in subsets. Not public; data on request to the PI.
Overview
The LCBC sample is the pooled longitudinal imaging database of the Center for Lifespan Changes in Brain and Cognition at the Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, led by Kristine B. Walhovd and Anders M. Fjell. It combines several observational and cognitive training studies that follow healthy people from early childhood to old age with repeated MRI, cognitive testing and other measures. The group uses it to model lifespan brain trajectories, to separate longitudinal change from cohort effects and to study early markers of Alzheimer's disease. The data are not public.
Composition
As analysed by Sørensen et al. (2021), the sample held 4,352 MRI scans of 2,017 cognitively healthy participants (1,212 female, 805 male), aged 4.1 to 93.4 years at recruitment (mean 30.1). First scans span December 2006 to January 2020, with a mean total follow-up of 4.3 years. Adults were screened by a health interview and excluded for neurological or psychiatric illness, serious head injury, untreated hypertension, diabetes, recent psychoactive drug use or memory complaints; older adults also had to pass an MMSE cutoff. Some children were recruited through the MoBa birth cohort and some adults through the Norwegian Twin Registry (Walhovd et al. 2022 supplement).
Acquisition
Scans come from Siemens 1.5 T Avanto and 3 T Skyra and Prisma scanners at Oslo University Hospital, with one Avanto at St. Olav's Hospital in Trondheim used for part of the sample. Participants who changed scanner were often scanned on the old and the new scanner at the same visit. The earliest LCBC study (Fjell et al. 2008) acquired two 3D T1-weighted scans and 30-direction DTI on the 1.5 T Avanto. A subset of 178 adults has [18F]flutemetamol amyloid PET (Roe et al. 2026).
Annotations
No manual labels are described. Published work uses FreeSurfer-derived volumes, cortical thickness and surface area.
Known limitations
- Not public. Participants have not consented to open online sharing, and data go out only on request to the PI with ethical and data protection approval. No data use terms are published.
- Counts per contrast and for PET come from subsets used in single papers; cohort totals are not reported.
- The sample grows over time, so numbers depend on the paper and its data freeze.
- Participants are mostly cognitively high-performing residents of the Oslo area.
Cohort
Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 2,017 subjects.
Sex
- Female 1,212 60%
- Male 805 40%
Age
mean 30.1 · range 4.13 to 93.4No age bins reported.
Modality
subjects
- PET 178 9%
Contrast / sequence
subjects, values can overlap
- T1-weighted 425 21%
- Diffusion-weighted 100 5%
PET tracer
subjects
- [18F]flutemetamol 178 9%
Condition
subjects, values can overlap
- Healthy control 2,017 100%
Country
subjects
- Norway 2,017 100%
License and access
Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer
Ask the authors or the data holder. No published process or terms, and access is at their discretion
No published license or data use terms
The data holder has published no license and no data use terms. Any use, sharing or commercial right has to be agreed with the data holder, and nothing can be assumed to be allowed. Default copyright and data protection law still apply.
Roe et al. 2026 state that LCBC participants have not consented to share their data publicly online and that LCBC data are available on request to A. M. Fjell, given appropriate ethical and data protection approvals. Sørensen et al. 2021 give the same conditions. No data use terms are published on the LCBC website.
What you can do
- Commercial use Not stated
- Not stated
- Train ML models Not stated
- Create derived data Not stated
- Publish results Not stated
What you can share
- Share the data Not stated
- Share derived data Not stated
- Share trained models Not stated
What you must do
- Cite or credit Not stated
- Share alike Not stated
- Sign an agreement Not stated
- Ethics approval Not stated
- Manuscript review Not stated
- Release code Not stated
- Return results Not stated
- Delete after use Not stated
Limits
- No re-identification Not stated
- Location limits Not stated
Citation
Sørensen Ø, Walhovd KB, Fjell AM. A recipe for accurate estimation of lifespan brain trajectories, distinguishing longitudinal and cohort effects. NeuroImage 226, 117596 (2021). doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117596
All numbers
Every number on this page, as stored in stats.csv, with its source.
| Measure | Breakdown | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects | total healthy participants in the LCBC longitudinal studies as analysed in 2021; first scans from 2006-12-11 to 2020-01-06 (Table S1 of the supplement) | 2,017 | sorensen2021 Section 1, Figure 3 |
| Scans | total MRI scans with FreeSurfer volumes; includes same-day double scans on two scanners | 4,352 | sorensen2021 Section 1, Figure 3 |
| Subjects | sex=female | 1,212 | sorensen2021-supplement Table S1 |
| Subjects | sex=male | 805 | sorensen2021-supplement Table S1 |
| Subjects | condition=healthy cognitively healthy; screened by health interview and MMSE | 2,017 | sorensen2021-supplement Section S1.2 |
| Subjects | country=NO | 2,017 | sorensen2021-supplement Section S1.1 |
| Mean age | total age at recruitment | 30.1 | sorensen2021-supplement Table S1 |
| Minimum age | total age at recruitment | 4.1 | sorensen2021-supplement Table S1 |
| Maximum age | total age at recruitment | 93.4 | sorensen2021-supplement Table S1 |
| Subjects | contrast=T1w adults aged 30 to 89 with 2 to 7 T1w timepoints (1511 scans) used by Roe et al.; the cohort total is not reported | 425 | roe2026 Methods, Participants, LCBC |
| Subjects | modality=PT [18F]flutemetamol amyloid PET (242 scans) in participants with longitudinal MRI; the cohort total is not reported | 178 | roe2026 Methods, Participants, LCBC |
| Subjects | tracer=flutemetamol see the modality=PT row | 178 | roe2026 Methods, PET analysis |
| Subjects | contrast=dwi adults aged 40 to 60 with DTI on 1.5 T Siemens Avanto; the cohort total is not reported | 100 | fjell2008 Methods, Sample |
Sources
The keys used in the table above.
- sorensen2021 Sørensen, Walhovd and Fjell 2021, NeuroImage (arXiv:2007.13446v2) paper
- sorensen2021-supplement Supplementary material to Sørensen et al. 2021 (OSF xnuhz, supplementary.pdf) paper
- roe2026 Roe et al. 2026, Cortical thickness changes precede high levels of amyloid by at least 7 years, Nature Neuroscience (PMC13533846) paper
- fjell2008 Fjell et al. 2008, The relationship between diffusion tensor imaging and volumetry as measures of white matter properties, NeuroImage (PMC2808804) paper
- walhovd2022-supplement Walhovd et al. 2022, Prenatal development has stable and consistent effects on the human brain throughout the lifespan, bioRxiv supplementary information paper