As the human brain ages, it shrinks and affects its ability to remember – it is a part of life. But there are a few lucky people called “Super Agars.” They have brains to fight back. For these people, memories remain as sharp as they have been in the past 30 years.
Carol Siegler, who lives in the Chicago suburbs of Palatine, is a super agar. At 82, she won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for age groups. She said it came in “as a joke.”
“I auditioned twice for “Jeopardy!” And they did enough to be invited to a live audition.
Today, Siegler is on track for her 90th birthday, says Tamar Geffen, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Meslam Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Gefen is currently researching in Northwestern’s Superaging program, which currently studies 113 Superagers. However, over the past 25 years, 80 super agars have donated their brain tissue to the program, leading to fascinating discoveries.
CNN spoke to Gefen about these decades of work. She is the co-author of a new analysis of the study published Thursday in Alzheimer’s Disease & Dementia, a journal of the Alzheimer’s Disease Association.
This interview is clearly edited and condensed.
CNN: How do you define Superager and what have you learned about their behavior over the years?
Side side: To become a super-organizer in a program at Northwestern, people need to go beyond 80 and undergo extensive cognitive testing. Acceptance in this study occurs only when a person’s episodic memory (the ability to remember everyday events and personal history of the past) is as or more cognitively normal as in their 50s and 60s.
They screen nearly 2,000 individuals, and they believe that they could be super attackers, with under 10% meeting the criteria. Over the past 25 years, we have studied about 300 super agars. Many of them have donated their brains for research.
One important feature of Superagers is that they look like very social people. They value connections and often work in the community. This is interesting as it is known that separation is a risk factor for developing dementia. Therefore, socially active is a known protective feature.
Another common thread of all super flavors is a sense of autonomy, freedom, and independence. They make decisions and live their lives the way they want to live.
I feel very strongly that successful aging is not just about sociality. I think it can invade their entire psychosocial being, especially in vulnerable states like health or older.
But when it comes to healthy behaviors, the super taste runs through the range. We have heart disease super agar, diabetes, not physically active and eat much better than our peers of similar ages.
There is one Superzer who drinks 4 beers each night. He laughs and says, “Maybe I was wrong, but I’ll never know.” He didn’t have the same twins to compare his behavior, so he lived at 108 instead of 98? I don’t know.
CNN: Many of your most interesting findings come from research into brain tissue in donors. What did you discover about the Superager Brain memory center?
side: Our study shows that the brain regions responsible for attention, motivation, and cognitive involvement known as the cingulate cortex are thickened with superagents, even when compared to people in their 50s and 60s.
In the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, we found that the super flavor is three times less tau tangles compared to its “regular” peers. Abnormal formation of tau proteins is one of the important signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
In Alzheimer’s disease, tau also targets neurons in primary cholinergic neurons. But that doesn’t happen in the super agar’s brain. Therefore, the cholinergic system is likely to be stronger, perhaps more plastic and flexible.
That’s interesting. Because I think Super Agar is concentrated. They are meticulous, involved and actively listen. Can you remember 13 out of 15 random words after 30 minutes? I imagine them etch the words of their cortical with chisels.
The superagar’s brain also has larger, healthier cells in the tumor cortex. This is an essential area of memory and learning, and leads directly to the hippocampus. Incidentally, the embryonic cortex is one of the first regions of the brain that was hit by Alzheimer’s disease.
Another study examined all layers of cells within the embryonic cortex of superagent and tried to measure neuron size. Layer 2, the most important layer for information transmission, was found to have a huge, plump, intact, beautiful, gigantic, iconic cortical neuron.
It was an incredible discovery as their insect neurons were even bigger than those of much younger people, some even in their 30s. It shows that structural integrity components are at work, such as architecture, bone, and the skeletons of neurons themselves.
We are expanding our research on these neurons to understand their biochemical signatures, determine what makes them special, and see if these signatures are found in other types of neurons in the SuperArgarh brain. Are these same neurons particularly vulnerable in Alzheimer’s patients? If so, how and why?
CNN: What did you learn from your research on how the brains of super participants respond to injuries, illnesses and stress?
side: We look at the brain inflammatory system of superagent with the goal of understanding how immune cells in the brain respond to disease and adapt to stress. Inflammation is a major component of cell loss in Alzheimer’s disease and almost all other neurodegenerative diseases, when exceeded certain thresholds.
Compared to its contemporary brains, superagars contain fewer activated microglia, which are brain-resident immune cells in the white matter. White matter is a superhighway of the brain, transporting information from one part of the brain to another.
Here’s how it works: Microglia are activated due to some antigen or disease. It is usually destructive to the brain. However, in some cases, microglia and other immune cells become overactive and overdrive, causing inflammation and potential damage.
However, the brain of Superagar is less active microglia. In fact, microglia levels They were on par with people in their 30s, 40s and 50s. This means that microglia do not need to be active, as it can mean that the super-flavored brain is less junk or disease. Or it could mean that microglia are efficiently responding to disease and toxin removal, and they are more plastic and adaptable, allowing microglia to activate, respond and then calm down.
All of this is fascinating. At the cellular level, the superagar brain’s immune system may be stronger or more adaptable, just like the layers of cells found in the tumor cortex.
CNN: It sounds like luck in a draw, whether you were born with the right genes to protect your brain. What does that mean for the future?
side: Genetics is difficult. It’s not just about whether there are genes, but how the internal and external environments work together to influence whether genes are “on” or expressed. This is the epigenetic part of the puzzle.
There is a list of candidate genes that we are beginning to study very carefully. These are genes that also play a role in aspects of lifespan, aging, cell repair, and cognitive reserve.
I’m excited about it. Not only hereditary genetics from parents, but also cellular level genetics allow each neuron or immune cell to perform its own task in the brain. With rapid advances in technology, we are confident that prevention and modifications at the genetic level will become part of our playbook.
Clearly, Alzheimer’s disease does not have one target resolution. We all know we want a simple fix, but it just doesn’t happen.
It is necessary to bring together many teams and many specialists to create a kind of personalized cocktail for prevention and treatment. I think that’s possible, but it will take some time.
