Superagers with amazing memories have Alzheimer’s brain plaques

How is your doctor making sure you get to be a super ager? Any protocols at all?

Sounds like confirmation of Bernadette from the nun study.

Superagers with amazing memories have Alzheimer’s brain plaques

By Jessica Hamzelou in San Diego

Having an agile mind in your 90s might sound like wishful thinking, but some people manage to retain youthful memories until their dying days. Now post mortems have revealed that these “superagers” manage to do this even when their brains have the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s diseases.
Superagers have the memory and cognition of the average person almost half their age, and manage to avoid Alzheimer’s symptoms. Aras Rezvanian at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and his colleagues have been looking at brain samples donated by such people to try to understand what their secret might be.
The group looked at eight brains, all from people who had lived into their 90s, and had memory and cognition scores of the average 50-year-old until their final days. Specifically, the team studied two brain regions – the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and the prefrontal cortex, which is key for cognition.

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They found that the brain samples of the superagers had plaques and tangles in them to varying degrees. These are sticky clumps and twisted fibres of protein that seem to be linked to the death of neurons, and are usually found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease after they die. Of the eight superager samples, two had such a high density and distribution of these proteins that they resembled the most severe cases of Alzheimer’s.

Plaque protection

When the team counted the neurons in the brain samples, they found that they had many more neurons than samples from people who had died with Alzheimer’s. This is surprising, as it is thought that plaques are toxic and lead to the loss of neurons during Alzheimer’s disease.
“The oldest old with superior memory can display the full range of Alzheimer’s pathology,” says Rezvanian, who presented his findings at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting on Monday. “It points to some unknown factors that protect some elderly from the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s,” he says.
Perhaps superagers just had more neurons to begin with, says Changiz Geula, who led the study. “They may actually be losing cognition and neurons, but start at high levels,” he says.
The findings support growing evidence that plaques and tangles might not be a direct cause of Alzheimer’s, says Cheasequah Blevins at University of Texas at Austin. “A lot of money was spent on getting rid of plaques, but it didn’t help – it actually made the patients quite sick,” she says. The next step is figuring out what the protective factor might be, she says.
Read more: Superagers with amazing memories have shrink-resistant brains; Drug that stops brain plaques may show if they cause Alzheimer’s

Brains can power up to get around Alzheimer's plaques

This might explain why Bernadette the nun could have a brain full of plaque and still function. And maybe explain the fact that higher blood pressure in the elderly leads to less cognitive decline.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26206-brains-can-power-up-to-get-around-alzheimers-plaques.html?#.VBboYWOVCug
A couple of paragraphs, rest at link.
Jagust found that older people with plaques had increased blood flow – which means stronger activation of that brain area – in the regions of the brain that are usually activated during memory formation, compared with the older people who did not have plaques. The team then analysed whether this extra brain activation might be helping to compensate for the plaques.

And the results were clear. In the case of the older people with beta-amyloid, the more accurate their memory of the picture, the more active their brain had been when they studied the image in the fMRI. "That suggested to us that they were able to ramp up activity to retain more information," says Jagust. "We interpret this as a compensation or plasticity. The older people who didn't have amyloid in the brain did not do it."

This boosting of brain activity seems to be related to the amount of plaques a person had. The more beta-amyloid protein someone had, the more they tended to ramp up their brain activity while memorising the scene. However, this effect tailed off in the people with the greatest amount of plaques. "It suggests this is a transitory phenomenon. Eventually, this sort of compensation becomes lost. And that might be something that happens in the progression to cognitive decline," Jagust says.

The results could also help explain why some people have the plaques without appearing to have dementia. "The fact that brain amyloid is detectable in cognitively normal elderly subjects has been used historically as an argument to support the idea that amyloid may not be as toxic as suggested by experimental studies," says Roger Nitsch, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "This work challenges this view by addressing how elderly subjects can retain normal cognition despite the presence of brain amyloid."

New Findings on Dementia Prevention

Not very good, I'll stick to my ideas here;
Give me aspirin, marijuana,  some beer, some more dark beer,  and a volume of Shakespeare and I'll delay dementia until I die. And have a chat with these nuns.
http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/new-findings-on-dementia-prevention/

Preliminary medical testing results have shown that aspirin may prevent dementia and intestinal cancers

Give me this, marijuana,  some beer, some more dark beer,  and a volume of Shakespeare and I'll delay dementia until I die. And have a chat with these nuns.
Challenge your doctor to give you something better to prevent dementia. Something better than this from Harvard Medical School. Or this generic stuff.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/20059273/aspirin-may-prevent-dementia-and-cancers-worlds-largest-study-shows/
The study of 15,000 healthy Australians aged over 70 was the largest ever clinical trial on the use of aspirin to prevent disease in the elderly.
Professor Mark Nelson from Hobart's Menzies Research Institute says the clinical trials could lead to cheap and simple treatment procedures.

One in three seniors die with dementia, Alzheimer's

Get your doctor on high alert. What specifically do you need to do to prevent that? Ask about that nun study. Findings from Nun Study Show Contradictions of Alzheimer's Disease
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57575090/one-in-three-seniors-die-with-dementia-alzheimers/
A shocking new report from the Alzheimer's Association finds one in three adults over 65 dies with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia.
 Alzheimer's Facts and Figures

Alzheimers and stroke

The following is a series of comments on a stroke forum where survivors worry about getting alzheimers. In a class I took the instructor stated that 40% of Azheimers diagnosises were wrong, mainly because general practitioners don't have the knowledge or ability to correctly diagnose it.
And sometimes brains from other sisters who appeared mentally intact when alive show extensive evidence of the disease.Findings from Nun Study Show Contradictions of Alzheimer's Disease
 I take this as hopeful so even if you have extensive Alzheimers you can still be mentally sharp. Which is quite a relief for me considering this article.
Research illuminates link between Alzheimer's and stroke
For years, neuroscientists have known that the risk of Alzheimer’s disease is nearly doubled among people who have had a stroke.
Research illuminates link between Alzheimer's and stroke


This particular article now speculates that what was normally considered to be a sign of Alzheimers -namely tangles and sticky plaques may actually be a sign of the fight against it. Which means to me that the nun study I quoted was probably not accurate New Science Sheds Light on the Cause of Alzheimer’s Disease
And AARP has better information than any of our stroke associations.

And then there is B vitamins - B vitamins may slow brain shrinkage
Although when I told this to a nurse, she said overdosing on B vitamins is not good.
I may have to figure out how to add to my brain reserve.The brain's reserve cells can be activated after stroke


You know the drill, don't listen to anything I have to say, ask your medical staff for information on this subject. If you are really lucky they won't say
'I know nuthin'