Word: functional
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Like some 4 million Americans, Sister Ada (not her real name) is suffering from Alzheimer's disease; as the years go by, she'll gradually lose her memory, her personality and finally all cognitive function. But advanced age does not automatically lead to senility. Ada's fellow nun, Sister Rosella, 89, continues to be mentally sharp and totally alert, eagerly anticipating the celebration of her 70th anniversary as a sister without the slightest sign of dementia. In a very real sense, this pair of retired schoolteachers haven't finished their teaching careers. Along with hundreds of other nuns in their...
...this knowledge comes from a single, powerful piece of ongoing research: the aptly named Nun Study, of which Sisters Ada and Rosella are part. Since 1986, University of Kentucky scientist David Snowdon has been studying 678 School Sisters--painstakingly researching their personal and medical histories, testing them for cognitive function and even dissecting their brains after death. Over the years, as he explains in Aging with Grace (Bantam; $24.95), a moving, intensely personal account of his research that arrives in bookstores this week, Snowdon and his colleagues have teased out a series of intriguing--and quite revealing--links between lifestyle...
...measure of the sisters' cognitive abilities while they were still young and in their prime. An epidemiologist could not have designed a better way to evaluate them across time. "For many years," says the National Institute's Suzman, "we had an inadequate sense of how connected late-life health, function and cognition were to early life. But in the past decade, spurred by the Nun Study, there is a growing appreciation for that connectedness...
...brain abnormality that predisposed them to mental decline later? That question remains unanswered--but follow-up studies, to be published next month in the journal Psychology and Aging, suggest that exercising what brain capacity you have offers some protection. While all the sisters show age-related decline in mental function, those who had taught for most of their lives showed more moderate declines than those who had spent most of their lives in service-based tasks. And that, says Kemper, supports the commonsense idea that stimulating the brain with continuous intellectual activity keeps neurons healthy and alive. (Of course, notes...
...mental abilities decline, his preliminary review has found, the expression of positive emotions also drops. While he suspects the whittling away of positive feelings are a consequence of the neurological changes of Alzheimer's, it is still possible that emotional states may play a role in determining cognitive function. To find out, Snowdon will next compare the emotional content of the sisters' writings with their autopsied brains, to see if positive emotions work to keep nerve connections snapping and if negative emotions dampen and eventually extinguish them...