Word: neural
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...leading theory to explain this fortunate disconnect is the brain-reserve hypothesis, which suggests that people who have more cognitive ability and more neural tissue to start with - sharper minds, broadly - may be better able to withstand the ravages of age. "In some ways, you could think of it like a trained athlete who might be able to resist some atherosclerosis of the heart," explains Dr. Bradley Hyman, director of the Massachusetts Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School...
...related decline - at least cognitive decline. As early as 1995, neuroscientist Carl Cotman, who studies aging and dementia at the University of California at Irvine, published a paper in Nature showing that physical exercise produces a protein that helps keep neurons from dying and spurs the formation of new neural connections in the brain. More recently, Cotman demonstrated in studies of elderly dogs and mice that enriching their social environment is associated with improvement in brain function...
...amid other genes that have been previously linked to autism, is responsible for regulating the flow of calcium into and out of cells. Nerve cells in the brain rely on calcium to become activated, and research suggests that imbalances in the mineral can result in the overstimulation of neural connections and create developmental problems, such as autism and even epilepsy, which is also a common feature of autism. (See six tips for traveling with an autistic child...
...Many of the risk factors included in the new screen are familiar: advanced age and the presence of Alzheimer's genes (which are associated with the growth of fatty plaques and tangles in the brain that gum up neural connections), for example, have long been clearly linked to dementia. Even heart disease risk factors are somewhat expected, since recent studies show that the same conditions that boost the risk of heart attack, such as high cholesterol, hypertension and atherosclerosis, may also raise the risk of dementia; the theory is that whatever is causing fat deposits in heart vessels may also...
...patients who were underweight, did not drink alcohol and took longer to put on and button a shirt were also at high risk for dementia. Barnes speculates that fine motor skills, such as those required to button a shirt, may be one of the first things to suffer as neural connections in the brain succumb to dementia. As for the alcohol connection, she suggests that people who drink alcohol may simply be healthier overall and therefore less vulnerable than others to mental decline. "It's possible that someone who is still enjoying a glass of wine each...