How brain vitality defies the passage of time and aging

The 'super-elderly' , people over 80 years old with the 'head' of a 50-year-old, have been studied by scientists for a quarter of a century in search of the formula for the best 'eternal youth', the one offered by having a healthy brain.

A team of scientists from Northwestern University in Chicago has been trying to decipher the keys to the indestructible brains of the "super-elderly" since 2000, following 290 participants and performing autopsies on 77 donated brains . Their findings appear in the scientific journal Alzheimer's & Dementia.

Unique people

The term "super-elder" was coined by researcher Marsel Mesulam, founder of the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease at Northwestern University in the late 1990s . His goal was to use the study of these individuals' unique neurobiological profiles to help identify early therapies to maintain brain health in old age.

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For researchers, a “super-elder” is a “ person with exceptional social and memory performance, comparable to that of people at least three decades younger, challenging the belief that cognitive decline is an inevitable part of aging ,” summarizes one of the authors, Sandra Weintraub, a researcher in the area of psychiatry at Northwestern .

Twenty-five years of testing participants has revealed that the memory performance of super-elderly people is exceptional, with results on word and object recall tests similar to those of people in their 50s and 60s . At the same time, they have been shown to be tremendously social people. The people studied had different lifestyles and exercise habits, but they all had one thing in common: they had strong interpersonal relationships.

Resilient brains

The autopsy of the brains of 77 "super-elders" also reveals characteristic brain structures and cellular features in these individuals. Dr. Weintraub emphasizes that their brain structure is "youthful," since " unlike brains that age normally, the "super-elders" do not show significant thinning of the cortex, the outer layer of the brain ."

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This crucial brain region plays an important role in integrating information related to decision-making, emotions, and motivation.

Compared with the brains of other people their age, the super-elders also have more von Economo neurons than normal, which are specialized cells related to social cognition, empathy, and decision-making; and larger entorhinal neurons, which are critical for memory. Some of the 77 brains studied contained amyloid and tau proteins (also known as plaques and tangles) , which are known to play a key role in the progression of Alzheimer's disease, but others did not develop either.

“ This indicates that they have brains that are extremely resilient to cognitive decline, because either they don't produce plaques or amyloid and tau tangles, or if they do, they don't affect their brains ,” says Northwestern's Weintraub.

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Researchers will continue to study the super-elderly to advance our understanding of the biological and behavioral traits that protect the brain from aging, with the goal of delaying and preventing diseases that cause cognitive decline and dementia. In that vein, researchers welcome and encourage brain donations to science for postmortem study .

EFE