Although it may seem like science fiction, it is not. According to a study published in the journalJournal of the International Neuropsychological Societyand conducted by experts from Northwestern University (USA),there is a select group of people over eighty years of age, known as the ” superagers ” or “superancianos”, which have a special brain anatomy that allows themthink and remember even better than people twenty or thirty years younger. Studying their brains with the help of three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging, Emily Rogalski and her colleagues have shown that there is more vitality in their cortex – the outermost layer of the brain, key to memory, attention and reasoning – which is also a lot thicker than that of other people of the same age, very similar to that of subjects around fifty years of age. As Rogalsky points out, a thinned cortex suggests the loss of neurons or gray matter. In fact, brain tests also showed that people ages 80 to 99 who suffered from memory decline had thinner cortices.
On the other hand, the brain images obtained in the study show that there is a deep region of the brain,the anterior cingulate cortex, What is iteven thicker in the “super old” than in any 50-year-old. This region is important for care. ? Perhaps superannuation is distinguished above all by having a very acute attention span, which is what would support their extraordinary memory ?, suggests Rogalsky.
The researchers hope that by identifying these “super-elders” – who plan to donate their brains once they die for the cellular study of their structures – they canuncover the secrets to keeping a young brain, and thus protect the rest of the population from the problems of memory loss typical of aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. “Instead of studying what goes wrong in the brain, we have analyzed elderly but exceptionally healthy brains”, clarify the researchers, who assure that in this sense their work is? Unique ?.
Another question that remains to be resolved is whether retaining brain volume protects thinking skills, or whether maintaining thinking skills protects brain volume. “Perhaps those whose brains are better ‘built to last’ structurally are those that are better built to last from a functional perspective, or perhaps those who exercise the brain have less atrophy,” observed Russell Swerdlow, director of the Center for Disease Alzheimer’s from the University of Kansas.
