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A PEEK INSIDE THE BRAINS OF ‘SUPER-AGERS’  
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Dana G. Smith
April 29, 2024
New York Times
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_ New research explores why some octogenarians have exceptional
memories. _

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When it comes to aging, we tend to assume that cognition gets worse as
we get older. Our thoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may
start to forget things, like the name of our high school English
teacher or what we meant to buy at the grocery store.

But that’s not the case for everyone.

For a little over a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of
people they call “super-agers.” These individuals are age 80 and
up, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years
younger.

Most research on aging and memory focuses on the other side of the
equation — people who develop dementia in their later years. But,
“if we’re constantly talking about what’s going wrong in aging,
it’s not capturing the full spectrum of what’s happening in the
older adult population,” said Emily Rogalski, a professor of
neurology at the University of Chicago, who published one of
the first studies
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super-agers in 2012.

A paper published Monday in the Journal of Neuroscience
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shed light on what’s so special about the brains of super-agers. The
biggest takeaway, in combination with a companion study
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out last year on the same group of individuals, is that their brains
have less atrophy than their peers’ do.

The research was conducted on 119 octogenarians from Spain: 64
super-agers and 55 older adults with normal memory abilities for their
age. The participants completed multiple tests assessing their memory,
motor and verbal skills; underwent brain scans and blood draws; and
answered questions about their lifestyle and behaviors.

The scientists found that the super-agers had more volume in areas of
the brain important for memory, most notably the hippocampus and
entorhinal cortex. They also had better preserved connectivity between
regions in the front of the brain that are involved in cognition. Both
the super-agers and the control group showed minimal signs of
Alzheimer’s disease in their brains.

“By having two groups that have low levels of Alzheimer’s markers,
but striking cognitive differences and striking differences in their
brain, then we’re really speaking to a resistance to age-related
decline,” said Dr. Bryan Strange, a professor of clinical
neuroscience at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who led the
studies.

These findings are backed up by Dr. Rogalski’s research
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conducted when she was at Northwestern University, which showed that
super-agers’ brains looked more like 50- or 60-year-olds’ brains
than their 80-year-old peers. When followed over several years, the
super-agers’ brains atrophied
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rate than average.

No precise numbers exist on how many super-agers there are among us,
but Dr. Rogalski said they’re “relatively rare,” noting that
“far less than 10 percent” of the people she sees end up meeting
the criteria.

But when you meet a super-ager, you know it, Dr. Strange said. “They
are really quite energetic people, you can see. Motivated, on the
ball, elderly individuals.”

Experts don’t know how someone becomes a super-ager, though there
were a few differences in health and lifestyle behaviors between the
two groups in the Spanish study. Most notably, the super-agers had
slightly better physical health, both in terms of blood pressure and
glucose metabolism, and they performed better on a test of mobility
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The super-agers didn’t report doing more exercise at their current
age than the typical older adults, but they were more active in middle
age. They also reported better mental health
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But overall, Dr. Strange said, there were a lot of similarities
between the super-agers and the regular agers. “There are a lot of
things that are not particularly striking about them,” he said. And,
he added, “we see some surprising omissions, things that you would
expect to be associated with super-agers that weren’t really
there.” For example, there were no differences between the groups in
terms of their diets, the amount of sleep they got, their professional
backgrounds or their alcohol and tobacco use.

The behaviors of some of the Chicago super-agers were similarly a
surprise. Some exercised regularly, but some never had; some stuck to
a Mediterranean diet, others subsisted off TV dinners; and a few of
them still smoked cigarettes. However, one consistency among the group
was that they tended to have strong social relationships
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said.

“In an ideal world, you’d find out that, like, all the
super-agers, you know, ate six tomatoes every day and that was the
key,” said Tessa Harrison, an assistant project scientist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated with Dr. Rogalski
on the first Chicago super-ager study.

Instead, Dr. Harrison continued, super-agers probably have “some
sort of lucky predisposition or some resistance mechanism in the brain
that’s on the molecular level that we don’t understand yet,”
possibly related to their genes.

While there isn’t a recipe for becoming a super-ager, scientists do
know that, in general
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eating healthily, staying physically active, getting enough sleep and
maintaining social connections are important for healthy brain aging.

_Dana G. Smith [[link removed]] is a Times
reporter covering personal health, particularly aging and brain
health. More about Dana G. Smith
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