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Can We Change The Way Our Brain Ages? These Scientists Think It’s Possible
It’s long been known that our lifestyles can help us stay healthy longer. Now scientists are wondering whether new technologies can also help slow the aging process of our brains by tracking what happens to them as we age.
One sunny morning, Marijke, 76, of Dutch origin, and her husband Tom welcomed me for breakfast at their home in Loma Linda, an hour east of Los Angeles.
Oatmeal, chai seeds, berries, but no processed sugary cereals or coffee were served – a breakfast as pure as the Loma Linda mission.
Loma Linda has been identified as one of the world’s Blue Zones, places where people have a higher than average life expectancy. In this case, it’s the city’s Seventh-day Adventist Church members who are living longer.
They generally do not drink alcohol or caffeine, follow a vegetarian or even vegan diet, and consider it a religious duty to take care of their bodies as best they can.
It’s their “health message,” as they call it, and it’s what made them famous: the city has been the subject of decades of research into why its residents live better and longer.
Dr. Gary Fraser of Loma Linda University told me that members of the Seventh-day Adventist community in that city can expect not only longer life spans, but also increased “healthy life expectancy”—that is, time spent in good health—by four to five years more for women and seven years more for men.
Marijke and Tom had moved to the city later in life, but both were now firmly anchored in the community.
There is no big secret to Loma Linda. Its residents simply live very healthy lives, are mentally stimulated, and enjoy the community that religion can often provide.
Lectures on healthy living, musical meetings and physical exercise classes are regularly organized.
I spoke with Judy, who lives with 112 others in an assisted living facility where there is always the “opportunity to have heart- and brain-opening conversations,” she told me.
“What I didn’t realize is how important socialization is for your brain…without it, it seems to shrink and disappear,” Judy said.
Science has long recognized the benefits of social interaction and how it can help prevent loneliness.
But it is now also possible to identify brains that are aging faster than they should, so that we can track them and, in the future, potentially treat them more preventatively.
As we move towards more personalized, predictive and preventative healthcare models, early diagnosis will be crucial in all areas of healthcare, thanks to the incredible possibilities of AI and big data.
Lara Lewington travels to California to meet with the scientists and experts who study our brain health and whether we can change the way our brains age.
Andrei Irimia, an associate professor of gerontology and computational biology at the University of Southern California, showed me computer models that assess how our brains age and predict their decline.
He created them using MRI scans, data from 15,000 brains and the power of artificial intelligence to understand the trajectory of brains that age healthily and those in which there is a pathological process, such as dementia.
“It’s a very sophisticated way of looking at patterns that we don’t necessarily know as humans, but that the AI algorithm is able to detect,” he said.
Professor Irimia of course took a look inside my head.
I had had a functional MRI scan before my visit, and after analyzing the results, Professor Irimia told me that my brain age was eight months older than my chronological age (although apparently the part that controls speech wasn’t aging that much. I could have told him that). However, Professor Irimia suggested that the results were within a two-year margin of error.
Private companies are also starting to commercialize this technology. One of them, Brainkey, offers the service in several clinics around the world. Its founder, Owen Philips, told me that in the future, it should be easier to get an MRI.
“It’s becoming easier and easier for people to get an MRI scan, and the images they get are getting better and better,” he said.
“I don’t want to be a bit geeky, but technology is at a point where we are able to see things much earlier than we used to. That means we can understand exactly what is happening in a patient’s brain. With AI, we can do that.”
Contrary to what Professor Irimia’s analysis of my MRI had revealed to me, Brainkey’s estimate pushed back the biological age of my brain by one year. I was also shown a 3D printed model of my brain, which appeared large and, I was assured, was life-size.
The goal here is not only to adopt a more precise approach to treatment, but also to be able to quantify the effectiveness of interventions.
The dramatic increase in life expectancy over the past 200 years has given rise to a host of age-related diseases. I wondered if, if we all lived long enough, dementia would come knocking.
Professor Irimia said it was a theory that many had studied although not proven, adding that the aim was to find a way to continue to push back dementia, hopefully beyond our life expectancy.
And it all comes back to the same point. All the scientists and doctors, and the people in the Blue Zone, say that lifestyle is key. Good nutrition, physical activity, mental stimulation and happiness are essential for our brains to age.
There’s another important factor, too, according to Matthew Walker, a 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 each day to restore the health of your brain and body,” he said. “There is no functioning of your mind that is not wonderfully enhanced when you sleep, or markedly impaired when you don’t get enough sleep.”
He talked about our brain’s cleaning system, which works while we sleep by removing beta-amyloid and tau proteins – these are “two of the main culprits of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Changes in sleep patterns are also associated with dementia. Professor Walker explained that this phenomenon does not only manifest itself in the 60s or 70s, but can also begin in the 30s. So identifying these changes through sleep tracking could potentially become a “midlife prevention model”.
Fauna Bio, a biotech company in suburban San Francisco, is collecting data on ground squirrels during and after hibernation. In this state of torpor, as we know, squirrels’ body temperature drops and their metabolism is reduced to just 1 percent of normal.
Meanwhile, they seem to be able to regrow neurons and recreate the connections their brains had lost. The company’s goal is to try to create drugs to replicate this process in humans, without the need to spend half the year underground. Although some people dream of it.
Untreated depression has also been shown to increase the risk of dementia. Professor Leanne Williams of Stanford University has identified a way to “visualize” some forms of depression on the brain using an MRI scan, and thus see if treatment has worked.
This could help scientists better understand the root causes of mental health problems such as depression, and provide a way to quantify how a patient’s treatment is progressing.
Few have had as much faith in science to achieve longevity as Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who spent millions trying to reverse his biological age.
Dozens of supplements, 19-hour fasts a day, workouts that make him look like he’s about to explode, and a host of (sometimes controversial) treatments are what he believes will turn back the clock.
But as Mildred, 103, whom I visited in Loma Linda, said so forcefully: “You definitely have to be very careful about your diet, that’s true, but I’m not in favor of, ‘You have to do this, and this, and this, and this.'” Do not touch this at all!“She thinks it’s more important that we live a little, and let’s be honest, she should know that.
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