A young brain
How? ‘Or’ What ? “By retracing the neural paths established according to each mind, via brain activity and memory storage capacities”, details Professor Anthony Wagner, principal author of the study.
The work was carried out with 100 volunteers aged 60 to 82, confronted with the following exercise: associating pairs of images representing a famous person and a place that corresponds to him. “This ability to connect a face to a place is indeed affected in the elderly,” said Professor Wagner.
Second stage of the study, the volunteers had to recall these duets of images orally without having them in front of them. At the same time, scientists watched the brain’s reaction on a CT scan.
By way of comparison, the scientists passed this same test to a control group made up of young people.
As a result, “the brain activity reported in elderly volunteers was the same as that observed in young subjects. The hippocampus, the structure involved in the memorization mechanism, was stimulated in the same way between the two groups. And in young people as in the elderly, “the cortex, an area activated when the same experience is experienced several times, also entered into activity”.
Proof therefore that cognitive decline and dementia do not always go hand in hand with aging! On the other hand, identifying abnormalities in the hippocampus and the cortex could contribute to the early diagnosis of these neurodegenerative disorders.
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Source: Destination Santé
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