Tara Spears-Jones

This is a really interesting paper, and they focused on neurogenesis, which is the production of new neurons.

When I trained as an undergraduate and a postgraduate student over 25 years ago, the dogma was you don't make new neurons.

But over the past decade or so, now we understand that in some parts of the brain, you do make new neurons.

One of those parts is the hippocampus, which is what this study was examining.

It's really important for learning and memory and spatial orientation.

And what they found was that in people who were super-agers, that is, they had more of this neurogenesis than in other people who were older and much more than in people who had Alzheimer's disease.

So one of the things they're proposing is that making these new neurons in this part of the brain might be boosting cognitive function in these people.

So what the authors did is they looked at post-mortem brain samples from this relatively small group of people.

They isolated individual nuclei.

That's the part of the cells that contains the DNA.

And they looked at thousands and thousands of these individual nuclei from these dozen or so people.

And it's from the patterns of the gene expression that they can tell which cells were likely to be newborn neurons.

This is a snapshot of dead brain, right?

So they couldn't prove for certain that these were newborn neurons.

But based on work in animals over the years, we know the pattern of expression of genes that happens in these newborn neurons.

And so they were just then comparing that pattern of both gene expression and how available the genes were for readings.

across these different groups.

Partly.

Partly it's luck in terms of the genes you inherit.

So in the wider field, we know that about a quarter of the variability in cognitive decline and cognitive ability in aging is due to your genes.