{"id":617839,"date":"2026-02-26T16:03:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T16:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/617839\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T16:03:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T16:03:21","slug":"brains-of-super-agers-are-still-strong-producers-of-new-neurons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/617839\/","title":{"rendered":"Brains of \u2018super agers\u2019 are still strong producers of new neurons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Adults whose brains still have strong neuron production seem to have better memory and cognitive function than do those in whom the ability wanes, finds a study published today in Nature1<\/a>. The authors examined brain samples from deceased donors ranging from young adults to \u2018super agers\u2019<\/a> \u2014 people older than 80 with exceptional memory.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

She lived to 117: what her genes and lifestyle tell us about longevity<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

They found that young and old adults with healthy cognition generated neurons, a process called neurogenesis, at high levels for their age. The team estimated that the new neurons made up only a small fraction \u2014 0.01% \u2014 of those in the hippocampus, a brain region that\u2019s essential for memory. By contrast, in people experiencing cognitive decline, including individuals with Alzheimer\u2019s disease, neurogenesis seems to falter: the researchers spotted fewer developing, or immature, neurons in those brain samples.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, a group of \u2018super agers\u2019 had an even higher number of immature neurons than did other groups, and significantly more than did those with Alzheimer\u2019s. However, the group sizes were small, so the findings were not all statistically significant.<\/p>\n

Maura Boldrini Dupont, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York City, says that the small size of the groups \u2014 each had ten or fewer individuals \u2014 is a reason to take the results with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n

Understanding the tools that the brain uses to generate neurons and maintain cognitive function in old age could help researchers to develop drugs that induce neurogenesis in people with cognitive decline, says co-author Orly Lazarov, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois Chicago.<\/p>\n

Controversy over neurogenesis<\/p>\n

The findings support the idea that people\u2019s brains continue to generate neurons even in adulthood. But that idea hasn\u2019t always been accepted.<\/p>\n

In the early 1900s, neuroscientist Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal suggested that the human brain could not form neurons after birth. Eventually, researchers found that neurogenesis did occur in childhood, but still thought that was the endpoint.<\/p>\n

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Blood test holds promise for predicting when Alzheimer\u2019s symptoms will start<\/p>\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s what they used to teach when I went to medical school,\u201d Dupont says.<\/p>\n

In the past few decades, however, this dogma was challenged by new evidence supporting neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus2<\/a>, fuelling an ongoing debate in neurobiology<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adults whose brains still have strong neuron production seem to have better memory and cognitive function than do…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":617840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[11],"tags":[39909,4465,210,10046,10047,831,159,54158,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-617839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-ageing","tag-brain","tag-health","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-neuroscience","tag-science","tag-stem-cells","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116137781387504541","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}