LCBC

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.