Cognitive aging: lessons from “superagers”

“But where did I put the keys? I’m really going crazy! » This type of complaint is common among older people because memory is one of the cognitive abilities that deteriorates the most with age. But some remain as effective as their 30-year-old counterparts. They were nicknamed super-agers (derived from English. grow old, age) because they age wonderfully. Marta Garo-Pascual of the Polytechnic University of Madrid and her colleagues have just shown that their white matter – the nerve fibers that connect neurons – resists the passage of time better than average.

Over the course of five years, researchers observed about sixty super-agers over 80 years of age, comparing them with a representative sample of adults of the same age using MRI. The results show that the myelin in their nerve fibers (the insulating sheath that helps conduct electrical current better) is in better condition and breaks down more slowly. This will lead to improved connectivity, allowing the temporal regions (including the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center) to be more effectively controlled by the frontal regions and thus facilitating memory retrieval.

This mechanism has yet to be confirmed, and the possible role of genetics remains to be seen, but either way, we know that lifestyle offers real levers for taking care of your white matter. The integrity of the latter is especially related to cardiovascular health, so anything that preserves the latter is of interest in this context: healthy eating, good sleep, adequate physical activity, etc.