Cognitive super-agers are people who are 60 years old and older but have the memory capacity of someone decades younger.
Researchers call them cognitive super-agers because their brains function like those of people 30 years younger. They appear to be biologically more youthful than their chronological age.
Cognitive super-agers have higher IQs, better attention spans, and more practical thinking skills than people their age. As they age, they continue to perform as well or even better than people decades younger.
How do you become a super-ager?
Dr. Bradford Dickerson, a neurologist at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues have been studying “super-agers” for several years. Their research shows that learning new things may be the best way to keep brain tissue functioning healthily.
In one experiment, a list of 16 nouns was read six times to 81 healthy adults, 40 of whom were between the ages of 60 and 80 and 41 of whom were between the ages of 18 and 35. They had 20 minutes to think of as many words as they could. Twenty-three of the older people could only remember nine or fewer phrases, which is typical for their age group. However, 17 super-agers could remember 14 or more words, the same as the younger people’s score.
A functional magnetic resonance imaging test was also done on the test subjects. This test shows how the brain works. The researchers found that some parts of the brains of older people with average test scores looked thinner, which is a sign of cell death. This was different with older people who scored as well as younger people. These parts of the brain do things related to emotions, language, and stress. They are also responsible for making sense of all the information from the reasons and regulating the body’s organs. When it comes to memory and attention tests, like the word memorization test, the thicker these parts of the brain are, the better a person does.
How could hearing aids help you stay healthy as you age?
Hearing loss that comes with aging is one of older people’s most common health problems. It can cause mental decline, social isolation, and depression. Recent research from the University of Maryland’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) shows that hearing aids help people hear better and improve brain function and working memory.
Over six months, this research team watched a group of people with mild to moderate hearing loss using hearing aids for the first time. Researchers used several behavioral and cognitive tests to determine how well people could hear, remember, pay attention, and process information. They also looked at how speech sounds changed the electrical activity in the auditory cortex and midbrain.
After six months, people who used hearing aids had better memories, better neural speech processing, and an easier time listening. Clinical Neurophysiology and Neuropsychologia was the journal where the study was published.
The leader of the research team, HESP Assistant Professor Samira Anderson, Ph.D., said, “Our results suggest that the benefits of auditory rehabilitation through the use of hearing aids may go beyond just better hearing. They may also include better working memory and auditory brain function.” “In the end, hearing aids can help fix some of the most common communication problems that come with getting older.”
The National Institutes of Health say that up to 28.8 million Americans could benefit from hearing aids, but only about a third use them. According to more and more research, hearing loss and memory loss in older people are linked. Aging and hearing loss can change how the brain processes speech, making it harder to understand what other people say, especially in noisy places.
Researchers say that the results of the UMD study give them hope that hearing aids can help at least some older people with cognitive and auditory brain function problems.
“We hope our findings show how important it is to make hearing aids easier for older people to get and more affordable for them, as well as to improve fitting procedures so that people keep wearing them and get the most out of them,” says Anderson.
Hearing loss isn’t something you have to live with. Treatment can be the first step to becoming a super-ager. If you’ve noticed changes in your hearing, see us today!