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Daily NewsIt’s lengthy been recognized that our existence will help to maintain us more healthy for longer. Now scientists are asking whether or not new expertise also can assist decelerate the ageing technique of our brains by holding observe of what occurs to them as we grow old.
One sunny morning, 76-year-old Dutch-born Marijke and her husband Tom welcomed me in for breakfast at their house in Loma Linda, an hour east of Los Angeles.
Oatmeal, chai seeds, berries, however no processed sugary cereal or espresso had been served – a breakfast as pure as Loma Linda’s mission.
Loma Linda has been recognized as one of many world’s so-called Blue Zones, locations the place folks have lengthier-than-average lifespans. In this case, it’s the metropolis’s Seventh-Day Adventist Church group who’re dwelling longer.
They typically don’t drink alcohol or caffeine, keep on with a vegetarian and even vegan weight-reduction plan and contemplate it an obligation of their faith to take care of their our bodies as finest they will.
This is their “health message”, as they name it, and it has put them on the map – the town has been the topic of a long time of analysis into why its residents stay higher for longer.
Dr Gary Fraser from the University of Loma Linda advised me members of the Seventh-Day Adventist group there can count on not solely an extended lifespan, however an elevated “healthspan” – that’s, time spent in good well being – of 4 to 5 years additional for ladies and 7 years additional for males.
Marijke and Tom had moved to the town later in life, however each had been now firmly embedded locally.
There’s no nice secret to Loma Linda. Its residents are merely dwelling a very wholesome life, holding mentally stimulated and valuing the group a faith can usually present.
There are common lectures on wholesome dwelling, musical get-togethers and train lessons.
I chatted to Judy, who lives with 112 others at an assisted dwelling facility the place there was all the time the “ability to have heart-opening, brain-opening conversations”, she advised me.
“What I didn’t realise was how important socialisation is to your brain… without it, it seems to shrink and go away,” Judy mentioned.
Science has lengthy recognised the advantages of social interactions and avoiding loneliness.
But now it is also doable to establish whose brains are ageing sooner than they need to, to allow them to be tracked and in future doubtlessly be handled higher preventatively.
As we transfer in the direction of extra personalised, predictive, preventative healthcare fashions, early analysis might be essential in all areas of well being – powered by the unbelievable potentialities of AI and massive information.
Computer fashions that assess how our brains age and predict their decline had been proven to me by Andrei Irimia, affiliate professor of gerontology and computational biology on the University of Southern California.
He had created them utilizing MRI scans, information from 15,000 brains and the ability of synthetic intelligence to know the trajectory of each brains which might be ageing healthily and people in which there’s a illness course of, reminiscent of dementia.
“It’s a very sophisticated way to look at patterns that we don’t necessarily know about as humans, but the AI algorithm is able to pick up on them,” he mentioned.
Prof Irimia did, in fact, have a look inside my head.
I’d had a practical MRI scan forward of my go to and, after analysing its outcomes, Prof Irimia advised me I had a mind age eight months older than my chronological age (though apparently the bit that controls speaking wasn’t ageing a lot. I may have advised him that). However, Prof Irimia recommended that the outcomes fall inside a two-year error margin.
Private corporations are beginning to commercialise this expertise, too. One agency, Brainkey, is providing the service in a wide range of clinics all over the world. Its founder Owen Philips advised me that in future, getting an MRI ought to turn out to be simpler.
“It’s becoming much more accessible for people to get an MRI scan, and the images coming off them are getting even better and better,” he said.
“I don’t mean to nerd out there. But the technology is just getting to a point where we are able to see things much earlier than we could in the past. And that means we can understand exactly what’s happening in an individual patient’s brain. With AI, we can support that.”
In contrast to what Prof Irimia’s analysis of my MRI scan had told me, Brainkey’s estimate knocked a year off my brain’s biological age. I was also presented with a 3D-printed model of it, which appeared substantial and, I was assured, was life-sized.
The aim here is not just a more precise approach to treatment, but also to be able to quantify how well any interventions are working.
Dramatic increases in life expectancy over the past 200 years have given rise to a host of age-related diseases. I did wonder whether, if we all lived long enough, dementia might come knocking at all our doors.
Prof Irimia said this was a theory many have investigated albeit not proven, adding that the aim was to find a way to keep on pushing dementia back, hopefully beyond our life expectancies.
And all of this takes us back to the same point. Every scientist and doctor, as well as those Blue Zoners, say lifestyle is key. Good diet, keeping active, mentally stimulated and happy are crucial to how our brains age.
There’s another important factor too, according to Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the best-selling book Why We Sleep.
“Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do every day to reset your brain and body health,” he evangelised. “There is no operation of your mind that is not wonderfully enhanced when you get sleep, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.”
He spoke of our brains’ cleansing system, which functions during our slumber by washing away the beta-amyloid and tau proteins – these are “two of the main culprits underlying Alzheimer’s”.
Changes in sleep patterns are also associated with dementia. Prof Walker described how we don’t just see this in our 60s or 70s – it can begin during our 30s. So, identifying those changes through sleep tracking could potentially become a “model of midlife prevention”.
Fauna Bio, a biotech company on the outskirts of San Francisco, is collecting data on ground squirrels during and after hibernation. In this state of torpor, as it is known, the squirrels’ body temperature drops and their metabolic rate is reduced to just 1% of normal.
During this time, they appear to be able to regrow neurons and remake the connections their brains had lost. The company’s aim is to try and create drugs to replicate this process in humans, without them needing to spend half the year underground. Even if some may long for that.
Untreated depression has also been shown to raise our risk of dementia. Professor Leanne Williams of Stanford University has identified a method of “visualising” some forms of depression on the brain using an MRI scan, and thus seeing if treatment has worked.
This may be able to help scientists understand more about the root causes of mental health conditions such as depression, as well as providing a way to quantify how treatment is going for a patient.
Few have put more faith in science to achieve longevity than Bryan Johnson – the tech entrepreneur spending millions in an effort to reverse his biological age.
Dozens of supplements, 19 hours a day of fasting, workouts that make him look as though he’s going to burst and an array of (sometimes controversial) treatments are what he hopes will turn back the clock.
But as 103-year-old Mildred, who I visited in Loma Linda mentioned forcefully, “You absolutely need to be very careful with your diet, it’s true, but I’m not down for, ‘You’ve got to do this, and this, and this, and absolutely not touch this! ‘”. She thinks it’s extra vital we stay just a little, and let’s face it, she ought to know.
Top picture: Getty Images
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