Some 80-year-olds' brains look eerily youthful—and a new study offers a clue as to why. Research published Wednesday in Nature examined the brains of "super-agers," people in their 80s who performed on memory tests like those decades younger. Compared with typical older adults, these super-agers had about twice as many newly formed neurons in the hippocampus, a region central to memory. They had roughly 2.5 times more than people with Alzheimer's, and, strikingly, more immature neurons than even adults in their 20s and 30s, per the New York Times. Those cells also showed distinctive genetic and epigenetic traits that may help shield them from age-related decline.
The findings feed into a long-running dispute over whether adults can grow new brain cells at all. Some scientists warned that methodological issues still cloud the picture. But study co-author Dr. Tamar Gefen says the study "shows the aging brain has the capacity to regenerate," per CNN, and a better understanding of super-agers' immature neurons could potentially lead to treatments that might keep older adults sharper longer. The study also found that people with Alzheimer's had an abundance of neural stem cells but far fewer cells that had matured, hinting that the process of neuron development might stall in the disease—an insight that could eventually point to new treatments aimed at reactivating those dormant cells.
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