Increased Mental Activity Can Help Prevent Aging
The current economic doldrums have many Americans casting a worried eye on their retirement accounts. But in order to assure yourself of a comfortable old age, there’s another fund on which you should be keeping tabs — a mental one. Ask yourself: How big is my cognitive reserve?
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Cognitive reserve is the term scientists use to describe the extent of the brain’s capacity to resist aging and degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. The notion that such a capacity could exist originated in a surprising discovery made almost 25 years ago, when the brains of 137 elderly residents of a nursing home were dissected after their deaths. Remarkably, researchers failed to find a direct relationship between the degree of Alzheimer’s disease detected in the residents’ brains (revealed by the presence of structures called plaques) and how impaired they had been while they were alive. In other words, some of these individuals were able to resist the ravages of the illness better than others — but how?