Category: Ageing

Categories : Ageing Medical Research & TechnologyTags :

Introducing Tardigrade Proteins into Human Cells can Slow Metabolism

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Scanning electron micrograph of an adult tardigrade. Source: Wikimedia Commons

University of Wyoming researchers have gained further insight into how tardigrades survive extreme conditions and shown that proteins from the microscopic creatures expressed in human cells can slow down molecular processes.

This makes the tardigrade proteins potential candidates in technologies centred on slowing the aging process and in long-term storage of human cells.

The new study, published in the journal Protein Science, examines the mechanisms used by tardigrades to enter and exit from suspended animation when faced by environmental stress.

Led by Senior Research Scientist Silvia Sanchez-Martinez in the lab of UW Department of Molecular Biology Assistant Professor Thomas Boothby, the research provides additional evidence that tardigrade proteins eventually could be used to make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration is not possible — and enhance storage of cell-based therapies, such as stem cells.

Measuring less than half a millimetre long, tardigrades can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero; heated to more than 150°C; survive radiation of several thousand times a human’s lethal dose; and even survive the vacuum of outer space.

They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes, according to the new UW-led research.

Co-authors of the study are from institutions including the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California-Merced, the University of Bologna in Italy and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Sanchez-Martinez, who came from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to join Boothby’s UW lab, was the lead author of the paper.

“Amazingly, when we introduce these proteins into human cells, they gel and slow down metabolism, just like in tardigrades,” Sanchez-Martinez says.

“Furthermore, just like tardigrades, when you put human cells that have these proteins into biostasis, they become more resistant to stresses, conferring some of the tardigrades’ abilities to the human cells.”

Importantly, the research shows that the whole process is reversible: “When the stress is relieved, the tardigrade gels dissolve, and the human cells return to their normal metabolism,” Boothby says.

“Our findings provide an avenue for pursuing technologies centred on the induction of biostasis in cells and even whole organisms to slow aging and enhance storage and stability,” the researchers concluded.

Previous research by Boothby’s team showed that natural and engineered versions of tardigrade proteins can be used to stabilize an important pharmaceutical used to treat people with hemophilia and other conditions without the need for refrigeration.

Tardigrades’ ability to survive being dried out has puzzled scientists, as the creatures do so in a manner that appears to differ from a number of other organisms with the ability to enter suspended animation.

Source: University of Wyoming

Categories : AgeingTags :

Want to Feel Young? Protect Your Sleep

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Photo by Mert Kahveci on Unsplash

Researchers at Stockholm University have discovered that sleep affects how old you feel, with important health implications. The study is published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Feeling young is not just a matter of perception: it is actually related to objective health outcomes. Previous studies have shown that feeling younger than one’s actual age is associated with longer, healthier lives. There is even support for subjective age to predict actual brain age, with those feeling younger having younger brains.

“Given that sleep is essential for brain function and overall well-being, we decided to test whether sleep holds any secrets to preserving a youthful sense of age,” says Leonie Balter, researcher at the Department of Psychology, Stockholm University.

In the first study, 429 individuals aged 18 to 70 were asked how old they felt, how many days in the past month they had not gotten enough sleep, and how sleepy they were.

It turned out that for each night with insufficient sleep in the past month, participants felt on average 0.23 years older.

In a second study, the researchers tested whether it was indeed the lack of sleep causing participants to feel older. They conducted an experimental sleep restriction study involving 186 participants aged 18 to 46. Participants restricted their sleep to four hours a night for two nights and another time slept sufficiently for two nights, with nine hours in bed each night.

After sleep restriction, participants felt on average 4.4 years older compared to when having enjoyed sufficient sleep.

The effects of sleep on subjective age appeared to be related to how sleepy they felt. Feeling extremely alert was related to feeling 4 years younger than one’s actual age, while extreme sleepiness was related to feeling 6 years older than one’s actual age.

“This means that going from feeling alert to sleepy added a striking 10 years to how old one felt,” says Leonie Balter, and states that the implications for our daily lives are clear:

“Safeguarding our sleep is crucial for maintaining a youthful feeling. This, in turn, may promote a more active lifestyle and encourage behaviours that promote health, as both feeling young and alert are important for our motivation to be active.”

Source: Stockholm University

Categories : Ageing NeurologyTags :

Human Brains are Getting Larger, which may Protect against Dementia

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Image: Pixabay CC0

A new study by researchers at UC Davis Health found human brains are getting larger. Study participants born in the 1970s had 6.6% larger brain volumes and almost 15% larger brain surface area than those born in the 1930s. The researchers hypothesise that the increased brain size may lead to an increased brain reserve, potentially reducing the overall risk of age-related dementias.

The findings were published in JAMA Neurology.

“The decade someone is born appears to impact brain size and potentially long-term brain health,” said first author Charles DeCarli, a distinguished professor of neurology and director of the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

“Genetics plays a major role in determining brain size, but our findings indicate external influences – such as health, social, cultural and educational factors – may also play a role.”

75-year study reveals brain changes between generations

The researchers used brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) from participants in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). The community-based study was launched in 1948 in Framingham, Massachusetts, to analyse patterns of cardiovascular and other diseases.

The original cohort consisted of 5209 men and women between the ages of 30 and 62. The research has continued for 75 years and now includes second and third generations of participants.

The MRIs were conducted between 1999 and 2019 with FHS participants born during the 1930s through the 1970s.

The brain study consisted of 3226 participants (53% female, 47% male) with an average age of about 57 at the time of the MRI.

The research led by UC Davis compared the MRIs of people born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s.

It found gradual but consistent increases in several brain structures.

For example, a measure that looked at brain volume (intracranial volume) showed steady increases decade by decade.

For participants born in the 1930s, the average volume was 1234mL, but for those born in the 1970s, the volume was 1321 mL, or about 6.6% greater volume.

Cortical surface area showed an even greater increase over the decades.

Participants born in the 1970s had an average surface area of 2104cm2 compared to 2056cm2 for participants born in the 1930s — almost a 15% increase in volume.

The researchers found brain structures such as white matter, gray matter and hippocampus (a brain region involved in learning and memory) also increased in size when comparing participants born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s.

Larger brains may mean lower incidence of dementia

Although the numbers are rising with America’s aging population, the incidence of Alzheimer’s – the percentage of the population affected by the disease – is decreasing.

A previous study found a 20% reduction in the incidence of dementia per decade since the 1970s.

Improved brain health and size may be one reason why.

“Larger brain structures like those observed in our study may reflect improved brain development and improved brain health,” DeCarli said.

“A larger brain structure represents a larger brain reserve and may buffer the late-life effects of age-related brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and related dementias.”

One of the study’s strengths is the design of the FHS study, which allows the researchers to examine brain imaging of three generations of participants with birthdates spanning almost 80 years.

A limitation is that non-Hispanic white participants make up the majority of the FHS cohort, which is not representative of the U.S. population.

Source: University of California – Davis Health

Categories : Ageing Diet and NutritionTags :

Molecule Present in both the Body and Coffee Improves Muscle Function in Ageing

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Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash

A research consortium led by Nestlé Research in Switzerland and the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) made a recent discovery that the natural molecule trigonelline – present in coffee, fenugreek, and also in the human body – can help to improve muscle health and function. The researchers published their findings in Nature Metabolism.

In an international collaboration among the University of Southampton, University of Melbourne, University of Tehran, University of South Alabama, University of Toyama and University of Copenhagen, the work builds on a previous collaborative study that described novel mechanisms of human sarcopenia.

Sarcopenia is a condition where cellular changes that happen during ageing gradually weaken the muscles in the body and lead to accelerated loss of muscle mass, strength and reduced physical independence.

One important problem during sarcopenia is that the cellular cofactor NAD+ declines during ageing, while mitochondria, the energy powerhouses in our cells, produce less energy.

The study team discovered that levels of trigonelline were lower in older people with sarcopenia.

Providing this molecule in pre-clinical models resulted in increased levels of NAD+, increased mitochondrial activity and contributed to the maintenance of muscle function during ageing.

NAD+ levels can be enhanced with different dietary precursors like the essential amino acid L-tryptophan (L-Trp), and vitamin B3 forms such as nicotinic acid (NA), nicotinamide (NAM), nicotinamide riboside (NR) and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN).

Assistant Professor Vincenzo Sorrentino from the Healthy Longevity Translational Research Programme at NUS Medicine added, “Our findings expand the current understanding of NAD+ metabolism with the discovery of trigonelline as a novel NAD+ precursor and increase the potential of establishing interventions with NAD+-producing vitamins for both healthy longevity and age-associated diseases applications.”

Nutrition and physical activity are important lifestyle recommendations to maintain healthy muscles during ageing. “We were excited to discover through collaborative research that a natural molecule from food cross-talks with cellular hallmarks of ageing. The benefits of trigonelline on cellular metabolism and muscle health during ageing opens promising translational applications,” said Jerome Feige, Head of the Physical Health department at Nestlé Research.

Source: National University of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

Categories : AgeingTags :

More Schooling is Linked to Slowed Aging and Increased Longevity

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Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels

Participants in the Framingham Heart Study who achieved higher levels of education tended to age more slowly and went on to live longer lives as compared to those who did not achieve upward educational mobility, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and The Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. Upward educational mobility was significantly associated with a slower pace of aging and lower risk of death. The results are published online in JAMA Network Open.

The Framingham Heart Study is an ongoing observational study first initiated in 1948 that currently spans three generations.

The Columbia analysis is the first to connect educational mobility with pace of biological aging and mortality. “We’ve known for a long time that people who have higher levels of education tend to live longer lives. But there are a bunch of challenges in figuring out how that happens and, critically, whether interventions to promote educational attainment will contribute to healthy longevity,” said Daniel Belsky, PhD, associate professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and the Aging Center and senior author of the paper.

To measure pace of aging, the researchers applied an algorithm known as the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock to genomic data collected by the Framingham Heart Study. The latest findings showed that, according to the yardstick of the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, two years of additional schooling translated to a two- to three percent slower pace of aging. This slowing in the pace of aging corresponds to a roughly 10 percent reduction in risk of mortality in the Framingham Heart Study, according to previous research by Belsky on the association of DunedinPACE with risk of death.

DunedinPACE was developed by the Columbia researchers and colleagues and reported in January 2022. Based on an analysis of chemical tags on the DNA contained in white blood cells, or DNA methylation marks, DunedinPACE is named after the Dunedin Study birth cohort used to develop it. DunedinPACE (stands for Pace of Aging Computed from the Epigenome), is measured from a blood test and functions like a speedometer for the aging process, measuring how fast or slow a person’s body is changing as they grow older.

Biological aging refers to the accumulation of molecular changes that progressively undermine the integrity and resilience capacity of our cells, tissues and organs as we grow older.

The Columbia researchers used data from 14 106 Framingham Heart Study spanning three generations to link children’s educational attainment data with that of their parents. They then used data from a subset of participants who provided blood samples during data collection to calculate the pace of biological aging using the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock. In primary analysis, the researchers tested associations between educational mobility, aging, and mortality in a subset of 3101 participants for whom educational mobility and pace of aging measures could be calculated.

For 2437 participants with a sibling, the researchers also tested whether differences in educational attainment between siblings was associated with a difference in the pace of aging.

“A key confound in studies like these is that people with different levels of education tend to come from families with different educational backgrounds and different levels of other resources,” explained Gloria Graf, a PhD candidate in the Department of Epidemiology supervised by Belsky, and first author of the study. “To address these confounds, we focused on educational mobility, how much more (or less) education a person completed relative to their parents, and sibling differences in educational attainment – how much more (or less) education a person completed relative to their siblings. These study designs control for differences between families and allow us to isolate the effects of education.”

By combining these study designs with the new DunedinPACE epigenetic clock, the researchers were able to test how education affects the pace of aging. Then, by linking the education and pace of aging data with longitudinal records of how long participants lived, the team was able to determine if a slower pace of aging accounted for increased longevity in people with more education.

“Our findings support the hypothesis that interventions to promote educational attainment will slow the pace of biological aging and promote longevity,” noted Graf. “Ultimately, experimental evidence is needed to confirm our findings,” added Belsky. “Epigenetic clocks like DunedinPace have potential to enhance such experimental studies by providing an outcome that can reflect impacts of education on healthy aging well before the onset of disease and disability in later life.”

“We found that upward educational mobility was associated both with a slower pace of aging and decreased risk of death,” said Graf. “In fact, up to half of the educational gradient in mortality we observed was explained by healthier aging trajectories among better-educated participants.” This pattern of association was similar across generations and held within family sibling comparisons: siblings with higher educational mobility tended to have a slower pace of aging as compared with their less educated siblings.

Source: Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health

Categories : Ageing ExerciseTags :

Yoga Provides Unique Cognitive Benefits to Older Women at Risk of Alzheimer’s disease

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Photo by Mikhail Nilov

A new UCLA Health study found Kundalini yoga provided several benefits to cognition and memory for older women at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease including restoring neural pathways, preventing brain matter decline and reversing aging and inflammation-associated biomarkers – improvements not seen in a group who received standard memory training exercises.

The findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, are the latest in a series of studies led by UCLA Health researchers over the past 15 years into the comparative effects of yoga and traditional memory enhancement training on slowing cognitive decline and addressing other risk factors of dementia.

Led by UCLA Health psychiatrist Dr. Helen Lavretsky of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, this latest study sought to determine whether Kundalini yoga could be used early on to prevent cognitive decline and trajectories of Alzheimer’s disease among postmenopausal women.

Women have about twice the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared to men due to several factors including longer life expectancy, changes in oestrogen levels during menopause and genetics.

In the new study, a group of more than 60 women ages 50 and older who had self-reported memory issues and cerebrovascular risk factors were recruited from a UCLA cardiology clinic. The women were divided evenly into two groups. The first group participated in weekly Kundalini yoga sessions for 12 weeks while the other one group underwent weekly memory enhancement training during the same time period. Participants were also provided daily homework assignments.

Kundalini yoga is a method that focuses on meditation and breath work more so than physical poses. Memory enhancement training developed by the UCLA Longevity centre includes a variety of exercises, such as using stories to remember items on a list or organising items on a grocery list, to help preserve or improve long-term memory of patients.

Researchers assessed the women’s cognition, subjective memory, depression and anxiety after the first 12 weeks and again 12 weeks later to determine how stable any improvements were. Blood samples were also taken to test for gene expression of aging markers and for molecules associated with inflammation, which are contributing factors to Alzheimer’s disease. A handful of patients were also assessed with MRIs to study changes in brain matter.

Researchers found the Kundalini yoga group participants saw several improvements not experienced by the memory enhancement training group. These included significant improvement in subjective memory complaints, prevention in brain matter declines, increased connectivity in the hippocampus which manages stress-related memories, and improvement in the peripheral cytokines and gene expression of anti-inflammatory and anti-aging molecules.

“That is what yoga is good for – to reduce stress, to improve brain health, subjective memory performance and reduce inflammation and improve neuroplasticity,” Lavretsky said.

Among the memory enhancement training group, the main improvements were found to be in the participants’ long-term memory.

Neither group saw changes in anxiety, depression, stress or resilience, though Lavretsky stated this is likely because the participants were relatively healthy and were not depressed.

While the long-term effects of Kundalini yoga on preventing or delaying Alzheimer’s disease require further study, Lavretsky said the study demonstrates that using yoga and memory training in tandem could provide more comprehensive benefits to the cognition of older women.

“Ideally, people should do both because they do train different parts of the brain and have different overall health effects,” Lavretsky said. “Yoga has this anti-inflammatory, stress-reducing, anti-aging neuroplastic brain effect which would be complementary to memory training.”

Source: University of California – Los Angeles Health Sciences

Categories : AgeingTags :

Old Age Grant is not Enough to Cover Care Needs, Researchers Find

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Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

By Daniel Steyn for GroundUp

Researchers at the University of Cape Town (UCT) have found that in most cases, the Older Persons Grant is not sufficient to meet the needs of elderly people in South Africa.

Professor Elena Moore and other researchers from Family Caregiving, based in the Department of Sociology at UCT, interviewed 30 families in rural KwaZulu-Natal and 50 families in the Western Cape to find out how families headed by pensioners are making ends meet and whether older persons are able to get the care they need.

About 3.9 million people in South Africa receive the monthly Older Persons Grant, also known as the Old Age Grant, currently at R2080 per person per month.

Family Caregiving analysed data from Wave 5 of UCT’s National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), which shows that the vast majority of beneficiaries live in households of five people where the average household income is R6850.

Older people have significant and unique care needs, the researchers argue. According to StatsSA data from 2021, the majority of older people need chronic medication and need to access healthcare facilities: 24% of older persons in South Africa have diabetes, 68% live with hypertension, and 14% have arthritis. Older people also often have difficulties with sight, mobility and cognition, meaning they need additional support to go about their day-to-day lives, say the researchers.

In a rural area in KwaZulu-Natal, Family Caregiving found that most households had between eight and nine members and were struggling to cover the cost of food, medical supplies, and transport to clinics.

In this area, accessing healthcare is expensive, the team found. A round trip to town by taxi cost R46 and a trip to the closest clinic and back costs R82. Physically disabled older people often have to hire a car for between R200 and R600 to get to a clinic and back. A pack of adult incontinence products costs R219 and lasts only seven days.

Because of the costs of transport and medical supplies, many of these large households were spending an average of only R1000–R1500 a month on food, according to the report. A lack of access to water and electricity creates an additional burden for older people in rural areas.

In urban areas, such as Cape Town, there is greater access to water and electricity, health facilities are closer, and households are smaller, meaning the Older Persons Grant is not stretched as far. But still, the researchers found, older people are often required to carry households at the expense of their own care.

Low income and low-middle income families in Khayelitsha and Eerste River told the researchers that the only way to make ends meet is to spend less on food. Many families are stuck in debt cycles, borrowing from loan sharks from month-to-month with extremely high interest rates. Unpaid utility bills stack up, and electricity tariff hikes and rising rental prices put further pressure on older persons.

The monthly cost of nutritious food for a family of seven is R5324, according to Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity’s household affordability index. Family Caregiving found that low-income households headed by older persons are often spending less than half that amount on food because of other household expenses. This has serious consequences for older people, especially those who need to eat before taking medication.

The report recommends additional investment by the government to care for older people, such as free transport to health facilities and consistent supply of incontinence products.

Republished from GroundUp under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Source: GroundUp

Categories : AgeingTags :

UK Austerity Politics Correlated with Increased Frailty in the Oldest Adults

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The period of austerity politics from 2012 to 2018 was associated with steeper increases in frailty with age compared to pre-austerity between 2002 and 2010, according to a new study published February 7th in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Carys Pugh of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues.

Previous research has linked a stalling in life expectancy growth to austerity politics implemented in response to the 2008–2009 financial crisis. However, the mechanism through which public spending cuts are associated with decreased life expectancy has been unclear.

In the new study, researchers analysed data on the frailty index, which captures broad age-related declines in functional ability and physical and mental health. The analysis included 16 410 people enrolled in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing 2002-2018 with a mean age of 67 years and a mean frailty index score of 0.15 (on a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 being maximum frailty).

The study found that frailty index scores increased more rapidly with age after implementation of austerity policies. This was the case for all population groups, across genders and socioeconomic groups, but was particularly so for the oldest people. For instance, among the poorest women aged 85+, the frailty index increased an average of 0.013 per year in the eight-year pre-austerity period (2002-2010) but increased by 0.021 per year, two thirds as much again, in the six-year austerity period (2012-2018).

The additional increase in frailty for all ages from 2012 to 2018 was similar in magnitude to the difference in mean frailty score between people five years apart – those aged 65-69 and those aged 70-74.

The authors conclude that frailty may be one mechanism through which public spending reductions have negative impacts on health and mortality, particularly among the oldest people in society. New austerity measures, they write, need careful consideration given their potential impact on long-term health.

The authors add: “Compared to the 2000s, we found that older people in England were becoming more frail, more quickly during the 2010s, and that frailty was particularly common in the poorest in society. Our work is another warning about the possible impacts of austerity on the health of an ageing nation.”

Categories : Ageing NeurologyTags :

Strongest Evidence Yet of Brain’s Compensation for Cognitive Decline in Aging

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Image: Pixabay CC0

Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that our brains can compensate for age-related deterioration by recruiting other areas to help with brain function and maintain cognitive performance.

As we age, our brain gradually atrophies, losing nerve cells and connections and this can lead to a decline in brain function. It’s not fully understood why some people appear to maintain better brain function than others, and how we can protect ourselves from cognitive decline.

A widely accepted notion is that some people’s brains are able to compensate for the deterioration in brain tissue by recruiting other areas of the brain to help perform tasks. While brain imaging studies have shown that the brain does recruit other areas, until now it has not been clear whether this makes any difference to performance on a task, or whether it provides any additional information about how to perform that task.

In a study published in the journal eLife, a team led by scientists at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the University of Sussex have shown that when the brain recruits other areas, it improves performance specifically in the brains of older people.

Study lead Dr Kamen Tsvetanov, an Alzheimer’s Society Dementia Research Leader Fellow in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, said: “Our ability to solve abstract problems is a sign of so-called ‘fluid intelligence’, but as we get older, this ability begins to show significant decline. Some people manage to maintain this ability better than others. We wanted to ask why that was the case – are they able to recruit other areas of the brain to overcome changes in the brain that would otherwise be detrimental?”

Brain imaging studies have shown that fluid intelligence tasks engage the ‘multiple demand network’ (MDN), a brain network involving regions both at the front and rear of the brain, but its activity decreases with age. To see whether the brain compensated for this decrease in activity, the Cambridge team looked at imaging data from 223 adults between 19 and 87 years of age who had been recruited by the Cambridge Centre for Ageing & Neuroscience (Cam-CAN).

The volunteers were asked to identify the odd-one-out in a series of puzzles of varying difficulty while lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, so that the researchers could look at patterns of brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow.

As anticipated, in general the ability to solve the problems decreased with age. The MDN was particularly active, as were regions of the brain involved in processing visual information.

When the team analysed the images further using machine-learning, they found two areas of the brain that showed greater activity in the brains of older people, and also correlated with better performance on the task. These areas were the cuneus, at the rear of the brain, and a region in the frontal cortex. But of the two, only activity in the cuneus region was related to performance of the task more strongly in the older than younger volunteers, and contained extra information about the task beyond the MDN.

Although it is not clear exactly why the cuneus should be recruited for this task, the researchers point out that this brain region is usually good at helping us stay focused on what we see. Older adults often have a harder time briefly remembering information that they have just seen, like the complex puzzle pieces used in the task. The increased activity in the cuneus might reflect a change in how often older adults look at these pieces, as a strategy to make up for their poorer visual memory.

Dr Ethan Knights from the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge said: “Now that we’ve seen this compensation happening, we can start to ask questions about why it happens for some older people, but not others, and in some tasks, but not others. Is there something special about these people – their education or lifestyle, for example – and if so, is there a way we can intervene to help others see similar benefits?”

Dr Alexa Morcom from the University of Sussex’s School of Psychology and Sussex Neuroscience research centre said: “This new finding also hints that compensation in later life does not rely on the multiple demand network as previously assumed, but recruits areas whose function is preserved in ageing.”

The original text of this story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source: University of Cambridge

Categories : Ageing Neurodegenerative DiseasesTags :

Did the Ancient Greeks and Romans Suffer from Dementia?

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Bust of Hippocrates. By ESM – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90175388

Age-related dementia is often assumed to having been with us all along, stretching back to the ancient world. But a new analysis of classical Greek and Roman medical texts suggests that it was extremely rare 2000 to 2500 years ago, in the time of Aristotle, Galen and Pliny the Elder.

The USC-led research, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, bolsters the idea that Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are diseases of modern environments and lifestyles, with sedentary behaviour and exposure to air pollution largely to blame.

“The ancient Greeks had very, very few – but we found them – mentions of something that would be like mild cognitive impairment,” said first author Caleb Finch, a University Professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

“When we got to the Romans, and we uncovered at least four statements that suggest rare cases of advanced dementia – we can’t tell if it’s Alzheimer’s. So, there was a progression going from the ancient Greeks to the Romans.”

Ancient Greeks recognised that aging commonly brought memory issues that we would recognise as mild cognitive impairment, but nothing approaching a major loss of memory, speech and reasoning as caused by Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.

Finch and co-author Stanley Burstein, a historian at California State University, Los Angeles, pored over a major body of ancient medical writing by Hippocrates and his followers.

The text catalogues ailments of the elderly such as deafness, dizziness and digestive disorders – but makes no mention of memory loss.

Centuries later in ancient Rome, a few mentions crop up. Galen remarks that at the age of 80, some elderly begin to have difficulty learning new things.

Pliny the Elder notes that the senator and famous orator Valerius Messalla Corvinus forgot his own name.

Cicero prudently observed that “elderly silliness … is characteristic of irresponsible old men, but not of all old men.”

Finch speculates that as Roman cities grew denser, pollution increased, driving up cases of cognitive decline.

In addition, Roman aristocrats used lead cooking vessels, lead water pipes and even added lead acetate into their wine to sweeten it – unwittingly poisoning themselves with the powerful neurotoxin.

(A few ancient writers recognised the toxicity of lead-containing material, but little progress was made in dealing with the problem until well into the 20th century. Some scholars blame lead poisoning for the fall of the Roman Empire.)

For this paper, Finch did not just think about the Roman Empire or the Greeks.

In the absence of demographic data for ancient Greece and Rome, Finch turned to a surprising model for ancient aging: today’s Tsimane Amerindians, an Indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon.

The Tsimane, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, have a preindustrial lifestyle that is very physically active, and they have extremely low rates of dementia.

An international team of cognitive researchers led by Margaret Gatz, a professor of psychology, gerontology and preventive medicine at the USC Leonard Davis School, found among older Tsimane people, only about 1% suffer from dementia.

In contrast, 11% of people aged 65 and older living in the United States have dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

“The Tsimane data, which is quite deep, is very valuable,” Finch said.

“This is the best-documented large population of older people that have minimal dementia, all of which indicates that the environment is a huge determinant on dementia risk. They give us a template for asking these questions.”

Source: University of Southern California