Even healthy brains fall with age. This is what you can do

After about 40 years our brains begin to lose a step or two.

Every year our response time slows with a few thousandths of a second. We are also less able to remember items on a shopping list.

Those changes can sign of a disease, such as Alzheimer’s. But usually they are not.

“Both things, memory and processing speed, change with age in a normal group of people,” says Matt HuentelmanA professor of TGEN, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, in Phoenix.

Huentelman should know. He helps run MindrowdA free online cognitive test that was taken by more than 700,000 adults.

About a thousand of those people had test scores that indicate that their brains were “exceptional”, which means that they performed as a person who was 30 years younger on testing of memory and processing speed.

Genetics naturally played a role. But Huentelman and a team of researchers have focused on other differences.

“We want to study these exceptional artists because we think they can tell us what the rest of us should do,” he says.

Early results suggest that sleep and maintaining cardiovascular health are a good start. Other take include avoiding smoking, limiting alcohol and getting sufficient exercise.

Huentelman was one of the many dozens of researchers who met each other this summer in Miami to discuss healthy brain aging. The event was organized by the McNight Brain Research FoundationThose studies finance for age -related cognitive decline and memory loss.

To maintain the cognitive function in later life, “we must understand [brain] Aging on a mechanistic level, “says Alice Luo ClaytonA neuroscientist who is the chief executive officer of the group.

Another speaker was Christian AgudeloA sleep neurologist at the Evelyn F. McNight Brain Institute of the University of Miami.

“I think the value of sleep and sleep deprivation was delivered to me when I had children,” says Agudelo.

Those children are now 4 and 6, so Agudelo gets more sleep. But his own experience is consistent with his research About the relationship between sleep and cognitive decline.

“The better you sleep, the better your brain health will be structurally and functional,” says Agudelo.

Keep in mind: sleeping better is not just about getting more sleep.

The key is to get high quality sleep, so that the brain through all sleeping phasesSays Agudelo.

Researchers can measure how well a person sleeps by following his brain wave patterns. But people usually know when they have had a good night’s sleep, says Agudelo.

“You go to sleep, you wake up and you feel that that experience was worth it,” he says. “You feel refreshed.”

Ensuring high -quality sleep is difficult. But people can improve the chance of certain behavior, says Agudelo

“Wake up every day at the same time and coordinate our sleep rhythms to the rhythm of the sun” can lead to better sleep, he says. So it can be ‘active, both social and physical’.

That behavior increases the “sleeping pressure”, the natural desire of the body to sleep as we wake up for longer, says Agudelo. When that pressure is high, he says, “We can fall asleep more easily and deeply.”

Aging of the brain is also influenced by vascular risk factors, such as blood pressure, cholesterol levels and diabetes, says Charles DecarliA neurologist who co-directs the Alzheimer research center of Alzheimer’s at the University of California, Davis.

People know that these risk factors usually contribute to medical conditions such as heart attack or stroke, says Decarli. But research On thousands of people aged 65 and older have discovered that these risk factors can also directly affect the brain – even if they do not cause a heart attack or other cardiovascular problems.

“The size of the brain, the form of the brain, the tissue integrity of the brain looks older in people who have these risk factors than people they don’t have,” he says.

So study Decarli and a team of researchers whether it is possible to protect the brain by treating aggressive disorders that influence blood circulation.

“The question is, if you have these diseases and they are well checked, will you have a younger -looking brain?” he says. “And the answer seems to be yes.”