MONDAY, July 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Superagers exhibit higher grey matter volume cross-sectionally and show slower total grey matter atrophy longitudinally than typical older adults, according to a study published online July 13 in The Lancet Healthy Longevity.
Marta Garo-Pascual, from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and colleagues characterized the brain structure of superagers and identified demographic, lifestyle, and clinical factors associated with this phenotype in a study involving 64 superagers and 55 typical older adults. Superagers were classified based on scoring at or above the mean values for a 50- to 56-year-old in the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test and within one standard deviation of the mean or greater for their age and education level in the three nonmemory tests.
The researchers found that cross-sectionally, superagers exhibited higher grey matter in the medial temporal lobe, cholinergic forebrain, and motor thalamus. Compared with typical older adults, they also showed slower total grey matter atrophy longitudinally, especially within the median temporal lobe. Faster moving speed and better mental health were the most differentiating factors for superagers in a machine learning classification that included 89 demographic, lifestyle, and clinical predictors. Group differences reflected inherent superager resistance to typical age-related memory loss based on similar concentrations of dementia blood biomarkers in superager and typical older adult groups.
“The observed between-group differences are therefore likely to reflect a superager resistance to age-related memory decline, rather than two groups at different points of a dementia-related process,” the authors write.
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