Norman Swann
speaker
14,464 appearances
150 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2005
last heard Feb 2013
Norman Swann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Bob Vassar is Professor of Cell Molecular Biology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
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And you're honing your cognitive skills by listening to The Health Report here on ABC Radio National with me, Norman Swan.
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Doctors and researchers just love talking about pathology, about the things that go wrong.
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But surely there's something to be learned when things go well.
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Researchers, also at Northwestern, have decided to do just that when it comes to thinking ability and memory, cognition.
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They've coined the term super-aged for a group of older people who perform at least as well, if not better, than people several decades younger.
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Professor Changus Gula is a neuroscientist at Northwestern University's School of Medicine.
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Speed of thinking, their memory,
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it's
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so far
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interesting in order to make comparisons changa's gula was lucky that he had brains of people who died in their 80s who weren't super aged but at the same time didn't have dementia when they died this could be a comparative group and what he and his colleagues found comes back to this plaque story you've been hearing about today
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as well as the other abnormality in the brains of people with dementia, and indeed which accumulates just with aging.
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These are called tangles.
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Now, you might recall from our first story that one of the components of these plaques is amyloid, a chemical that seems to jam up nerves and perhaps even destroy them.
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So it's a bit paradoxical that these plaques might be increased in some super-aged people.
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If this finding is real, Cenkiz Güler thinks the clue is what happens to amyloid before it sets into concrete, the concrete being these plaques around nerves.
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This immature, soluble form of amyloid is called soluble amyloid and may be the truly toxic stuff in dementia, at least in early thinking decline.
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So what could be going on in these elderly super thinkers' brains?
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There's lots of things about people who, some people call them exceptional survivors, people who get to old age and can perform well.
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They usually have low blood pressure.
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Showing 821–840 of 14,464 · page 42 of 724
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