United States: Researchers are learning more about how our brains age and what can help keep them healthy as we get older. Things like doing exercising, not smoking, speaking another language, and playing music can help our brains stay sharp.
A review paper released Thursday from Genomic Press New York’s Genomic Psychiatry journal indicates that some aspects of cognitive abilities in older age may be linked to scores obtained by the individual at age 11 in tests.
The study based on the Lothian Birth Cohort 1921 and 1936 in Scotland means that nearly 50 percent of the differences between people on cognition later in life and why some people deteriorate more or less quickly than others might be set early in childhood.
But key aspects of adult fitness seemed to be positively associated with intelligence and the rate of brain aging.
As reported by the CNN Health, “Indeed, we would not say that this is solid evidence for these factors increasing your brain age per se but we have found that things like being physically and mentally active and engaged, having few ‘vascular’ risk factors (such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, BMI), speaking a second language, playing musical instruments, and having a younger-looking brain and many more show detectable-but-small associations,” Simon Cox, an author of the new paper
“We came up with the idea that ‘Marginal Gains, Not Magic Bullet’ is a good way to think about a recipe for better cognitive ageing: Instead of identifying one major risk factor, what we get is hundreds and hundreds of (overlapping) factors that all provide a minuscule boost to your likelihood of cognitive ageing, Cox noted.
He marked also that such a lifestyle – when the identified factors are taken altogether – may tell the story of as much as 20% on top of the disparities in the cognition deterioration in the 70s to 82 ages.
The Lothian Birth Cohorts involve data from two studies of older adults: two Scottish groups of adults: one from 1921, another from 1936.