‘SUPER AGERS’ – men and women aged between 60-80 whose memories can put teenagers to shame – may hold the key to defying dementia, according to new research.
A study has found certain key areas of their brains resemble those of people up to half a century younger – offering hope of new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
Scans revealed they retained youthful characteristics. While the cortex, the outermost sheet of neurons critical for many thinking abilities, and other parts of the brain typically shrink with ageing, a number of those regions were comparable in size to those of young adults.
Dr Alexandra Touroutoglou, of Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “We looked at a set of brain areas known as the default mode network, which has been associated with the ability to learn and remember new information, and found that those areas, particularly the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex, were thicker in super agers than in other older adults.
“In some cases, there was no difference in thickness between super agers and young adults.”
Some loss of memory is often considered an inevitable part of ageing, but the findings published in The Journal of Neuroscience reveals how some people appear to escape that fate.
It examined a remarkable group of older adults whose memory performance is equivalent to that of much younger individuals.
It is the first step in a research program aimed at understanding how some older adults retain youthful thinking abilities and the brain circuits that support them.
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While most older adults experience a gradual decline in mental ability, some researchers have described older adults – dubbed ‘super agers’ – with unusually resilient memories.
The study recruited forty 60 to 80 year olds, 17 of whom performed as well as adults four to five decades younger on memory tests and the rest with normal results, and compared their brains with those of forty-one 18 to 35 year olds.
Dr Touroutoglou said: “Previous research on super aging has compared people over age 85 to those who are middle aged.
“Our study is exciting because we focused on people around or just after typical retirement age – mostly in their 60s and 70s – and investigated those who could remember as well as people in their 20s.”
Co author Professor Lisa Barrett said they also examined a group of regions known as the salience network, which is involved in identifying information that is important and needs attention for specific situations.
The researchers also found preserved thickness among ‘super agers’ in several regions, including the anterior insula and orbitofrontal cortex.
Critically, the researchers showed not only that super-agers had no shrinkage in these brain networks but also that the size of these regions was correlated with memory ability.
One of the strongest links between brain size and memory was found in an area at the intersection of the salience and default mode networks.
Previous research has shown that this region, the para-midcingulate cortex, is an important hub that allows different brain networks to communicate efficiently.
Dr Touroutoglou said: “We believe effective communication between these networks is very important for healthy cognitive ageing.”
Program leader Prof Bradford Dickerson, of Harvard Medical School, said understanding which factors protect against memory decline could lead to important advances in preventing and treating age related memory loss and possibly even various forms of dementia.
He added: “We desperately need to understand how some older adults are able to function very well into their seventh, eighth and ninth decades.
“This could provide important clues about how to prevent the decline in memory and thinking that accompanies aging in most of us.”
