Older adults who remain cognitively sharp as they age have a genetic advantage over their peers, new research shows.Scientists at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Chicago found that so-called super-agers generate twice as many new neurons in the hippocampus — a part of the brain critical to learning and memory — as typical older adults. Their research was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.“This discovery means that the super-agers have a molecular capability that allows them to have higher [cognitive] performance, and that includes more neurogenesis,” said study co-author Orly Lazarov, the director of UIC’s Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Training Program. “Neurogenesis is one of the most profound forms of plasticity in the brain.”AdvertisementAdvertisementIn other words, she said, super-agers’ brains are more “accommodating.”A super-ager is a person 80 or older who boasts the memory capacity of someone at least two to three decades younger, as determined by delayed word recall testing, according to Dr. M. Marsel Mesulam, founder of the Mesulam Institute for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who coined the term.In the new study, Lazarov and her colleagues studied 38 brains from five groups of deceased adults: healthy adults 40 and younger, healthy older adults, people in early stages of cognitive decline, people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and super-agers. The six super-ager brains were donated by Northwestern’s SuperAging Program, which last year celebrated its 25th anniversary.The researchers examined neurons at different stages of development within the brain tissue samples. Super-agers had twice as many new, or “immature,” neurons as healthy older adults, the study showed. Compared with people with Alzheimer’s, super-agers had two and a half times as many.A super-ager brain in the lab. (S …
