Tara Spears-Jones

Tämä on todella mielenkiintoinen paperi, ja ne keskittyivät neurogenesiasta, joka on uusien neuronien tuotannossa. Kun treenasin yliopistokansalaisena ja yliopistokansalaisena 25 vuotta sitten, dogma oli, ettei uusien neuronien tuotannossa ole. Mutta viime viikkojen aikana ymmärrämme, että joissain osissa huoneessa on uusien neuronien tuotannossa. Yksi näistä osista on hippocampus, jota tämä tutkimus tutki.

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.

And how were they able to test it then? Was it comparing the brains of older people who seemed to have great cognitive ability with those who didn't or with younger people? How did it work? 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.

Gene expression patterns show which cells were likely to be newborn neurons. This is a snapshot of dead brain. 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. They were just then comparing that pattern of both gene expression and how available the genes were for reading.

näiden eri ryhmien kautta. Onko se vain onnistuminen, jos me olemme superaikaiset? Yleensä onnistuminen, kun puhutaan genit, joita olet käyttänyt. Lämpimästi tiedämme, että noin puolivuotiaan kognitiivinen pysyvyys ja kognitiivinen voimakkaus on johtuen genit. Mutta on joitain modifioitavia faktoreita. Emme kaikki voi olla superaikaiset, jos olemme todella onnistuneita.

our genes, but all of us can boost our brain resilience a bit. The most well substantiated evidence goes to exercise, which you won't be surprised is good for you. Exercise boosts your brain resilience, it boosts your vasculature, it reduces inflammation, and both of those things are known to impact brain aging. And it also directly boosts this adult hippocampal neurogenesis. So you make a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor when you exercise, and that stimulates this neurogenesis in that part of the brain.

Neurologista professori Tara Spears-Jones.