Watching too much TV in mid life can shrink your brain, new research has shown. A study at the University of Southern California found that older people who had spent many hours infront of the box had smaller regions of the brain involved in memory, decision making, and visual processing, along with other signs of damage. It wasn’t just couch potato status to blame. People in mentally engaging desk jobs often showed healthier brain patterns. Meanwhile other new research similarly suggests that memory loss in old age is not inevitable. Scientists appear to have ruled out one possible reason why so called “superagers” in their 80s and 90s retain memories as sharp as people in their 50s and 60s? Scientists have spent nearly 20 years identifying the biological, neurological, and other traits they display but one key question remained unanswered: are they just people who inherited unusually low genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease? Now researchers at the University of Chicago have now found it can’t be that simple. They analyzed the largest cohort of superagers studied alongside the latest measures of genetic risk for Alzheimer’s. And their results indicated that extraordinary memory in later life cannot be explained solely by low inherited risk. The findings highlight the need to study the potential protective mechanisms that may help some people maintain unusually strong cognitive abilities.
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