Meet Margaret the Super Ager, whose brain is defying the ageing process.

Pedro_P

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

A young Margaret and her mum, who died at 72 with Alzheimer's disease(Supplied: Margaret McArthur)
▼ Margaret remembers how terrible it was having a parent with Alzheimer's disease.
When her mum started putting packets of milk on the stove and the kettle in the fridge Margaret had to make the heartbreaking decision to put her in a nursing home.
"It was terrible to see Mum who was so vital and vibrant just becoming like a vegetable," says Margaret.
Her mum died aged 72.
When Margaret was 80 she signed up for the Australian Imaging, Biomarker & Lifestyle  (AIBL)study that is helping researchers better understand the factors that lead to Alzheimer's disease
"I assumed I was probably already on the way and it would be too late to help me," says Margaret.
"But I thought it's such an awful disease and I just wanted to help eradicate it for the next generation."

Now aged 86, Margaret has the mental faculties of people decades younger.(Catalyst)
But amazingly, regular brain scans have found that Margaret — now 86 — has virtually no chance of developing dementia, says Jo Robertson, a neuropsychologist with the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, who is involved in the AIBL study.
"She doesn't have any of the brain proteins that we know start to accumulate two decades before people start to have symptoms of dementia."
On top of that, tests have shown Margaret's attention and working memory — used, for example, when you reverse a string of digits in your mind — is equivalent to the average 65-year-old.
And her ability to learn and retain new verbal information is greater than 99 per cent of people her age.
"Most people Margaret's age would exhibit a decline in their memory," says Dr Robertson.
She says a "handful" of people like Margaret who seem to be resistant to the usually observed effects of ageing were identified among over 100,000 in the AIBL study.
This week on ABC's Catalyst, Margaret and a team of these so-called "Super Agers" demonstrated they could hold their own against a much younger team, which included Margaret's 61 year-old son Stuart.
The Super Agers were able to memorise the way out of a maze and perform well at other cognitive tests including remembering names and faces.
So can understanding Super Agers help tell us what keeps our minds younger for longer?
It's early days, but some clues are emerging from places like the Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.
Ten years ago a team there led by neuropsychologists Sandra Weintraub and Emily Rogalski flipped its research paradigm on the head.
Instead of looking at what was going wrong to give people Alzheimer's disease they started looking at what was going right for those whose brains weren't ageing the same way.
While the term "Super Ager" is now being used a bit loosely, the researchers say they originally intended it to apply to a person over the age of 80 who scores at least as well as an average 50- to 60-year-old, in particular memory tests.
In all, they've studied 80 Super Agers using brain imaging, cognitive and genetic tests as well as surveys to probe lifestyle and family history in the search for factors that can explain their unusual abilities.

Margaret has had a lifetime of volunteering and now helps out at a community centre.(Supplied: Margaret McArthur)
With all the evidence that a healthy lifestyle staves off dementia, the team assumed  (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, continue reading this article here: Source