By age 11, children might already exhibit major indicators as to what their cognitive abilities will be when they’re older. There are ways to improve those abilities, however, according to a new study.
For their research, scientists reviewed data from Scotland’s Lothian Birth Cohorts studies to make their findings. The cohorts included a group born in 1921 and one born in 1936. At 11, the subjects took cognitive tests, then retook those tests in their 70s, 80s and 90s.
“We first took MRI scans of the participants when they were 73 years old. One of the most striking things about the study for me is how wide the differences are between their scans,” Lothian Birth Cohort Studies director and study coauthor Simon Cox told CNN in an email.
“Even though they were all the same age, some brains looked perfectly healthy (and wouldn’t be out of place amongst scans of 30 or 40 year olds),” he wrote. “Whereas others showed lots of shrinkage and damage to the white matter connections, along with other features that are related to cognitive aging and dementia.”
While many of the brain aging precursors were detectable in subjects by age 11, the researchers said around 20% of the variables related to cognitive decline came down to adult lifestyle factors.
“We have found that things like keeping physically and mentally active and engaged, having few ‘vascular’ risk factors (such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, BMI), speaking a second language, playing musical instruments, and having a younger-looking brain and many more show detectable-but-small associations,” Cox added.
While the research review uncovered a variety of cognitive influences in children and adults alike, Cox stressed that brain aging is not inevitable in older adults. Every brain is a little different.
“We came up with the idea that ‘Marginal Gains, Not Magic Bullet’ is a good way to think about a recipe for better cognitive aging: rather than finding that one single thing has a huge risk, we see lots and lots of (often partly-overlapping) factors that each probably contributes a little bit to your risk for cognitive aging,” he wrote.
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