A study of 2,928 Spanish-speaking adults linked older-appearing speech profiles with several measures of brain and biological aging. Larger speech-age gaps were associated with poorer cognition, dementia diagnoses and greater social adversity, although patterns varied across groups. The research does not establish whether speech recordings can predict future dementia or track an individual’s aging rate over time. The pace, pitch and word choices of everyday speech may carry clues about aging that extend beyond a person’s voice. A large Latin American study found that older-appearing speech profiles were associated with brain aging, memory difficulties and molecular markers of biological aging. The team developed a machine-learning “speech clock” that estimates chronological age from acoustic and linguistic features. Its broader value may lie in how those estimates differ from actual age. However, the tool remains a research candidate, and the mainly cross-sectional study cannot establish whether it predicts future dementia. Researchers analyzed speech from 2,928 participants across five Latin American countries, including healthy adults and people with MCI, Alzheimer’s, and frontotemporal dementia. Speech features were used to …