Forever young? Scientists decode some mysteries of ageing

Washington (dpa) – Getting on in years has arguably always been a puzzle. There's the 82-year-old part-time farmer down the road who remains light on his feet and a repository of repartee while his 60-something accountant neighbour gets short of breath walking from car to office. According to a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University, such "super agers" could have an innate advantage over the prematurely old, at least when it comes to cognition. According to the university, those in their 80s with brain function "comparable to people 20 or 30 years younger" are much less likely to carry the dreaded APOE-ε4 gene than those of the same age bracket exhibiting signs of mental decline. Not only are the forever-young octogenarians 68% less likely to harbour "the gene that nobody wants" than peers with dementia, they are 19% less likely to have it than the "cognitively normal" of the same age. Published in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia, the team's findings were based on a study of around 18,000 people and carried even more good news for super agers, who are almost 30% more likely to have APOE-ε2 – "the variant you’d want," according to Vanderbilt – than those who age as expected, and 103% more likely than those with dementia. According to Leslie Gaynor, a professor of medicine at the university, there appears to be a "super-ager phenotype" which can in turn "be used to identify a particularly exceptional group of oldest-old adults with a reduced genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease." The findings should not prompt apathy or fatalism among those who may be genetically susceptible to decline. And the same goes for those with super-ager genes who might become complacent. Other recent research has pointed out the interplay between physical and cognitive health and at the same time spelled out that eating well, getting enough sleep, staying physically active and having a track record of reading, learning languages and keeping a few hobbies alive can contribute to delaying or even preventing decline.  "High body mass index (BMI) and high blood pressure are direct causes of dementia," said Ruth Frikke-Schmidt, a doctor at Copenhagen University Hospital and whose team's investigation was published last week by the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.  In 2024, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found evidence that exercise stimulates motor neurons. Around the same time, the British Journal of Sports Medicine published research explaining that those who keep fit have "lower dementia risk long-term." The following information is not intended for publication dpa spr coh

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