{"publication_id":"b092a509-1835-4eb4-b3c1-854e808a1ed0","screening":{"identified":65,"screened":65,"excluded":0,"included":65,"included_or_retained":65,"flow":["identified","screened","excluded_with_reasons","included"],"wording":"65 candidate receipts retained after source retrieval, deduplication, and topic filtering. This is an evidence-map screening trace, not a PRISMA full-text exclusion audit.","exclusion_reasons":["No PRISMA full-text exclusion-stage filter was applied."]},"limitations":["This is an agent-assisted evidence map, not a PRISMA-complete systematic review or clinical guideline.","It is not PROSPERO-registered and should not be read as medical advice.","Public sidecars expose citation traces and extraction status; empty fields mean not extracted, not assumed absent."],"contradictions":["The conclusion is that Brain age MRI remains a bounded geroscience case: the retained clinical and adjacent evidence profile defines the scope for targeted testing, while mixed and null findings limit any unqualified anti-aging claim.","Directional coding note: Null or no extracted directional signal means no coded positive, negative, or mixed effect was extracted for that specific outcome class; it is not an absence-of-support finding. Positive, negative, mixed, unclear, and null are outcome-specific codes, so a bounded rationale can be supported by adjacent or different outcome evidence while another outcome remains null or unclear. Contextual claims contain bibliographic background, mechanism, methods, exposure definitions, or population context rather than effect-direction evidence. When an outcome-class summary uses no extracted directional signal, it should state the source proportion, such as X/Y sources, to avoid ambiguity.","Key findings from source synthesis: First, the strongest positive or favorable signals are treated as narrow source-level signals, not broad clinical proof (Levakov 2023: outcome=Cardiometabolic; direction=positive; directness=indirect; tier=B2; claims=56; Yilmaz 2025: outcome=Contextual Adjacent Evidence; direction=unclear; directness=indirect; tier=B2; claims=29; Huang 2025: outcome=Immune and Inflammation; direction=null; directness=indirect; tier=B2; claims=60). Second, negative, mixed, unclear, or no-directional-signal rows are given equal interpretive weight (Ran 2022: outcome=Contextual Adjacent Evidence; direction=null; directness=indirect; tier=B2; claims=58; Tanner 2025: outcome=Safety and Comorbidity; direction=null; directness=indirect; tier=B2; claims=50; Selitser 2025: outcome=Contextual Adjacent Evidence; direction=null; directness=review; tier=B2; claims=43). Third, the bounded conclusion follows from the balance of source direction, outcome class, evidence tier, and directness rather than from source count alone.","The curated corpus on brain-age MRI is overwhelmingly observational, with a single randomized trial (Haudry 2025, an RCT with a mechanistic/biomarker endpoint) supplying direct interventional evidence in older adults; no long-term mortality or hard-outcome RCTs in non-diabetic or non-meditation populations are present, so causal claims about anti-aging benefit cannot be sustained. The cardiometabolic and immune-inflammation outcome classes are represented only by cohort designs (Levakov 2023, Motaghi 2025, Huang 2025, Mouches 2022, Derboghossian 2024, Selitser 2025, Tavakoli 2025), and even within those cohorts effect directions diverge — Levakov 2023 reports a positive weight-loss effect after 18 months of lifestyle intervention while Mouches 2022 and Derboghossian 2024 report null associations between cardiovascular risk factors and brain-age gap, leaving the cardiometabolic signal unresolved. The absence of replication-grade interventional evidence means the headline synthesis is constrained to biomarker associations rather than clinical benefit, and the headline-level null-vs-positive tension in cardiometabolic outcomes is not adjudicable from this corpus alone."]}