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The study found that SuperAgers produced about twice as many new neurons as healthy older adults and roughly two and a half times as many as people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
By Shula Rosen
Scientists from Israel and the United States have identified a biological feature that may explain why some people in their 80s retain unusually strong memory, finding that these individuals generate far more new brain cells than others their age, according to a study published in the journal Nature.
The research examined a group known as “SuperAgers,” adults ages 80 and older whose ability to remember everyday events and personal history matches that of cognitively normal people in their 50s and 60s.
The study found that SuperAgers produced about twice as many new neurons as healthy older adults and roughly two and a half times as many as people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
The study was led by Orly Lazarov, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Training Program. Lazarov earned her doctorate at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Technology.
Senior contributors included Tamar Gefen, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a neuropsychologist at Northwestern’s Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease, along with researchers from the University of Washington.
Researchers analyzed donated postmortem brain tissue from five groups: healthy young adults, healthy older adults, individuals with mild or early dementia, patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and SuperAgers.
All SuperAger samples came from donors ages 80 or older with exceptional memory performance.
Using multiomic single-cell sequencing, the team examined nearly 356,000 individual cell nuclei from the hippocampus.
This approach allowed scientists to measure gene activity and DNA accessibility at the same time, enabling them to identify different stages of neuron development, from progenitor cells to mature neurons.
The analysis showed that neurogenesis occurs in healthy adult brains but was most active in SuperAgers, whose hippocampi also displayed a distinct biological “resilience signature” supporting the growth and survival of new neurons.
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