Super Agers

Unravelling the Mystery of “Super Agers”: Insights from Neuroscience Research

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Super Agers
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For over a decade, scientists have been studying a group they call “super agers.” These individuals, aged 80 and above, have the memory abilities of someone 20 to 30 years younger.

When we think about aging, we often assume that cognitive abilities decline as we get older. We expect our thoughts to slow down or become confused, and to start forgetting things like the name of our high school English teacher or what we intended to buy at the grocery store. However, this isn’t true for everyone.

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Insights into Exceptional Memory and Brain Health of Super Agers

Most aging and memory research focuses on people who develop dementia in their later years. But, as Emily Rogalski, a neurology professor at the University of Chicago, points out, “if we’re constantly talking about what’s going wrong in aging, it’s not capturing the full spectrum of what’s happening in the older adult population.” Rogalski published one of the first studies on super agers.

A recent paper in The Journal of Neuroscience sheds light on what makes the brains of super-agers special. The main finding, along with a companion study from the previous year on the same group, is that their brains exhibit less atrophy compared to their peers.

The research involved 119 octogenarians from Spain: 64 super-agers and 155 older adults with typical memory abilities for their age. Participants underwent tests to assess memory, motor, and verbal skills, brain scans, blood draws, and answered questions about their lifestyle and behaviors. The results showed that super-agers had more brain volume in areas crucial for memory, particularly the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. They also had better-preserved connectivity between regions in the front of the brain involved in cognition. Both groups showed minimal signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Bryan Strange, a clinical neuroscience professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who led the studies, remarked, “By having two groups that have low levels of Alzheimer’s markers, but striking cognitive differences and striking differences in their brain, then we’re really speaking to a resistance to age-related decline.” This is supported by Rogalski’s research, initially conducted at Northwestern University, which showed that super-agers’ brains resembled those of 50 or 60-year-olds more than their 80-year-old peers.

While precise numbers of super-agers are unknown, Rogalski noted they’re “relatively rare,” with “far less than 10 percent of the aging people she sees” meeting the criteria. Dr. Strange added, “When you meet a super ager, you know it. They are really quite energetic people, you can see. Motivated, on the ball, elderly individuals.”

Factors Influencing Super-Agers, a Spanish Study

The exact factors contributing to someone becoming a super-ager remain unclear. The Spanish study noted some differences in health and lifestyle behaviors between super-agers and their peers. Super-agers had slightly better physical health, particularly in terms of blood pressure and glucose metabolism, and they performed better on mobility tests. Although they didn’t report more exercise in old age, they were more active during middle age and reported better mental health.

However, overall, there were many similarities between super-agers and regular agers. Dr. Strange pointed out, “There are a lot of things that are not particularly striking about them.” He added, “We see some surprising omissions, things that you would expect to be associated with super-agers that weren’t really there.” For instance, there were no significant differences in diet, sleep, professional backgrounds, or alcohol and tobacco use between the groups.

Diverse Lifestyle Habits of Super-Ager

In Chicago, the behaviors of some super-agers were equally surprising. Some exercised regularly, while others did not; some followed a Mediterranean diet, while others relied on TV dinners; and a few even continued smoking cigarettes. However, one consistent trait was their strong social relationships, as noted by Rogalski.

“In an ideal scenario, we would discover that all super-agers ate six tomatoes a day and that was the secret,” joked Tessa Harrison, an assistant project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with Rogalski on the initial Chicago super-ager study. Instead, she suggested that super-agers probably have “some sort of fortunate predisposition or a resistance mechanism in the brain at the molecular level that we don’t yet understand.”

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