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Preventive Measures

American Fitness, Jan, 1999 by Peg Jordan

How do you care for an aging brain?

The growing preventive health movement in America is knocking on the door of mental functioning. New products show up every day in health food stores with suggestive labels pitching basic mind food, brain nutrients, as well as cognitive and memory enhancers. Popular books also speak to the baby boomers' fear of mental decline.

The assumption is that since medical science has found ways to prevent and reverse heart disease through lifestyle management, we should somehow be able to prevent the inevitable decline of mental functioning and age-related memory loss.

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To discuss some of the latest theories and interventions regarding mental aging, I talked with Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences and neurosciences at Stanford University. Winner of the Young Investigator of the Year Award in 1992, he is routinely cited as one of their most popular lecturers. He will be delivering a six-hour seminar for health professionals called "The Aging of the Brain, the Aging of the Mind" for CorText Seminars this fall. For more information on the lecture series, call (800) 639-8914.

According to Sapolsky, lifestyle factors such as a peaceful environment, lifelong learning, rewarding social interactions, aerobic exercise and good nutrition are fundamental to successful aging and serve as protective mental agents. However, if you're cancer prone or suffer early onset of Alzheimer's disease, no amount of peaceful environment will necessarily avert the condition. However, those life-enhancing features tend to correlate with people who have more successful elderly years.

A few years ago, a famous study of nuns revealed the brains of deceased, elderly sisters in religious orders who enjoyed active service showed signs of normal degeneration similar to the brains of Alzheimer's victims, but their behavior was anything but demented. The nuns exhibited active, alert minds with no resemblance to Alzheimer personality traits. "Here's where lifestyle factors play a big role," Sapolsky says. "These sisters belonged to organizations materially well-off. They were well fed their whole lives, medically cared for, housed, physically active, probably had minimal alcohol consumption and no substance abuse. They also had social support and affiliation, and weren't shuffled about."

Many researchers think where there is a high degree of predictability and control over your environment, there is also a tendency to grow and protect a healthy network of neural connections. You sort of grow your dendrite "tree," the complex synaptic network that results from lifelong mental challenges, continuous learning and fulfilling social connections.

The number of neurons you have does not matter as much as the number of connections your neurons make, as well as the "strength" of those connections. Also, if your nutrition consists of fresh, whole foods and a good intake of antioxidants, you have the ability to protect nerve cells and enhance cognition. Daily physical activity can supply you with mood-enhancers such as endorphins and other opiates, making you the happy, agile grandparent everybody loves to have around.

However, recent neuroscientific investigations reveal that once a health crisis occurs, none of these lifestyle approaches can pull you out of the woods. For example, the hypoxic damage that results from a severe stroke is so debilitating that Sapolsky says, "You want high-tech intervention through drugs, neuron implants, gene therapy and all the cutting edge techniques." Preventive measures can act like a good savings account, perhaps, but deductive science has a hard time proving it. If your reserves are good when "all hell breaks loose," you may survive the crisis better, according to Sapolsky. "If your blood vessels are strong and your diet has been good that may well count in the long run," he says.

Expecting basic neuroscience to lead us to a grand panacea has resulted in some disappointments. Ten years ago, with the finding that high levels of glutamate were not good for neurons, scientists were optimistic that development of a drug to block glutamate would help lessen the damage of stroke, seizures and amnesia. "However, in terms of drugs, it's easier to study something in a lab or a rat's head than a person," Sapolsky explains. "We're basically working in reductive science realms, focusing on an experimental disease we've induced. That's a lot different from working on a live person in an emergency room with a brand new stroke and ongoing ischemic damage. Even though you've identified these pathways as important, nature finds a dozen alternate routes to get to the same messy conclusion," Sapolsky explains. How do neuroscientists maintain their optimism in the face of all these dead ends? "You settle for small victories," he says.

Telomere research was also banked on to provide secrets on how to decelerate mental aging, but it's actually provided more of a vocabulary for explaining why we age versus solutions to prevent it. According to Sapolsky, thanks to research on telomeres--the end caps of genes--we now have a potential mechanism to explain why older subjects don't do things as well as younger ones, why old cells are more prone to DNA error and why they're less capable of self-correction. How to stop the process hasn't really been explained, however.

Preventive Measures

American Fitness, Jan, 1999 by Peg Jordan

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