We explain.
SuperAgers are people over eighty years old who score as well on memory tests as people under twenty or thirty years old. Usually, memory capacity decreases with age. US researchers looked at the brains of 24 deceased people, six of whom were elderly. What does it look like? Older adults with sharp minds have much larger nerve cells, also called neurons, than many other people. For example, it found that their neurons were approximately 25 percent larger than those of people with early Alzheimer’s disease, 15 percent larger than their “normal” peers, and six percent larger than those of people with early-onset Alzheimer’s. A big difference, according to the researchers.
Neurons are located in the entorhinal cortex, an area of the brain that deals with our long-term memory. In addition, this is the first brain region affected by Alzheimer’s disease. The entorhinal cortex consists of six layers of neurons, the second of which receives information from other memory areas of the brain. In SuperAgers, the second layer thus contains an astonishing number of large, healthy neurons. The researchers expected that neurons in those acute 80s were larger than in people with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. “But the fact that the neurons were much larger than those in healthy individuals and in much younger people was surprising,” study author Tamar Geffen told Scientiac. So the researchers suspect that SuperAgers are born with large neurons.
Also striking: SuperAgers’ large neurons do not have neurofibrillary tangles. These are the crosslinking tau proteins that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. In other words: In people with Alzheimer’s disease, nerve cells shrunk. Neurons that have not been exposed to synaptic tau proteins remain large and healthy. Why aren’t these large neurons affected?
source | NU.nlAnd the ScientistsAnd the Medical news today
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