Dr. Sandra Weintraub

So I looked at the raw scores for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, all the way down to 80.

And between 20 and 40, you have a bit of a dip.

So it doesn't just start at 65.

It starts a lot earlier.

But then, of course, your responsibilities.

And by the time you're in your mid 40s, you're juggling too much.

Okay, that's a really excellent question.

So as people get older, we know that there is shrinkage, that the brain does shrink over time.

And we did a comparison between what we call super-agers and normal-agers in how much change is there over a two-year period of time.

There's not a huge change, brain doesn't just shrink, but if you compare super to normal, there's more shrinkage in the normal aging brain than in the super aging brain.

Statistically significant, but it's not like a huge amount.

The other thing that happens, and I'm glad you mentioned Alzheimer's because I think that Alzheimer's is becoming overused.

Alzheimer's is a disease where there are proteins that get manufactured in the brain that then attack brain cells and kill them.

Now, over the age of 65, any brain you look at under the microscope is going to have what are called neurofibrillary tangles that contain tau and amyloid plaques that contain amyloid.

Every person over 60, there's not any people who don't have those things in their brain to some extent or other.

In the super agers, the first brain we looked at, as you mentioned, had one tangle.

So we were so excited.

We thought, okay, we've discovered the secret to super aging.

You don't have tangles.

You don't make the Alzheimer changes.