Longevity and the Aging Brain

What does living to extended ages mean to the aging brain?  Longevity is part of the vernacular now with advances in medical treatment and higher living standards.  The perception of longevity is living a longer and healthier life.  There are so many variables that can upend this definition.

When I was in grad school studying gerontology, the question of successful aging was always presented to us.  Of course, living a healthy life was a standard of comparison for aging.  But then, there are those who have survived and are living with challenging health problems.  Does this make their older years unsuccessful?  Is longevity a curse for them?  This is where aging becomes a very personal experience that can’t be labeled successful or unsuccessful. 

The physical attributes of aging are easier to understand.  Our aging brain can be the wildcard.  After a certain age, every little brain slip is a cause for concern.  What is happening to my brain and am I getting Alzheimer’s?

Normal Brain Aging

There are natural changes occurring in our brains all the time.  The number of neurons (brain cells) remains constant from birth.  It is the number and complexity of neural connections that change dramatically.  At least one million new neural connections are made every second in a baby’s brain.  90 percent of brain growth happens before kindergarten. 

The beneficial brain changes continue throughout our youth, teens, and twenties.  The massive production of synaptic connections increases brain volume.  We develop many thinking abilities that appear to peak around age thirty. 

Even though our brains don’t know how old we are, the massive production of synaptic connections starts to decline.  With that change, we begin to lose brain volume!  The loss of brain volume is due to a loss of cells and degeneration of nerve fibers. 

How Aging Alters Our Brain

Pay notice to how these aging changes affect cognition. Aging effects in the brain do not happen in chronological order. 

Cortical Density, the heavily ridged outer surface of the brain, undergoes modest thinning.  This is due to the steady decline of synaptic connections.  Fewer thread-like nerve fibers to send and receive nerve signals in the cortex may contribute to slower cognitive processing.  This process can begin as early as age 20.

Beginning in the sixth and seventh decades, brain mass shrinks steadily.  This volume loss occurs particularly in areas such as the frontal lobe (higher cognitive function), and the Hippocampus (involved in encoding new memory).

Aging is linked to a decrease of white matter – bundles of axons that carry nerve signals between brain cells.  The length of the bundles of axons shortens and the myelin shrinks.  Myelin improves nerve transmission efficiency. This loss may slow processing.  These changes are correlated with reduced cognition.

The aging brain generates fewer Neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers in the brain.  Decreased dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, and norepinephrine activity contribute to declining cognition and increased depression among older people.

What’s Normal for an Aging Brain?

“Our memory processes did not evolve to keep accurate and detailed accounts of the events in our lives.  The brain is not our stenographer or record keeper.” (Psychology Today). We think our memories should be high-definition video recordings of all that has happened to us.  In reality, memory should be thought of more like a story told around a campfire.  My best advice is - to cut yourself some slack when it comes to forgetting and misremembering.  The less you stress out about your memory, the more you tend to remember.

This isn’t all gloom and doom. There are positive changes in an aging brain:

·      Larger vocabularies

·      Better understanding and meaning of words

·      Greater depth and breadth of knowledge

You can still create new memories, learn new skills, and increase your knowledge.

What Types of Changes Are Common?

■     “I’m too old to learn anything new.”

■      As we age our ability to lay down new memories may be affected, making it harder to learn.  It’s not that we forget more easily, but the initial encoding takes longer.

■      If we take the time to commit the new information to memory – focus on it and fully learn it – then we will typically remember it as well as younger people.

■     “This is too complicated for me.”

■      Multitasking taxes the brain at any age and trying to do several things at once may be more difficult as we become slower to shift from one set of skills to another. Slowed processing aspects of cognition, such as planning and reasoning, and tasks that require “parallel processing,” such as holding multiple items in memory.

■     “What was that called again?”

■      Remembering names and numbers and recalling where and when you learned them are examples of ‘strategic’ memory, which starts declining around age 20. We may have to intentionally engage our brains to learn information that we want to recall later.  Repeat to yourself, “This is important, and I need to remember it,” repeating the information out loud, or making associations with what you already know – can help.

■     “Wasn’t I supposed to be somewhere this afternoon?”

■      Without specific cues to jog our memory, we sometimes fail to recall such things as appointments made weeks earlier. Although the information was put into storage properly, we are not accessing it when we need it. The best remedies are visual reminders: write notes to yourself, track dates on a calendar, and post notices, invitations, or papers that need attention.

Final Thoughts on the Aging Brain

Our brain doesn’t know how old we are.  These aging changes occur in relation to the lifestyle we lead.  If we exercise, challenge our brains, eat healthy, clean foods, connect with other people, get a good night’s sleep, and reduce stress, take care of our bodies, our brains age at a slower pace. The opposite is also true.  When our brain ages faster, we are at a higher risk of developing dementia. 

We have increased our lifespan by a couple of decades.  Our risks for dementia increase the older we get.  Age is a nonmodifiable risk factor. It is critical for us to live a brain-healthy lifestyle so that we can stay high-functioning to the end.

End Note:  My Book, The Boomer Brain, is about the aging brain and the risk factors we face for dementia as we age.  It is also a book about creating an aging brain that can function optimally until the end.  Check it out on Amazon.

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