To Sustain the Elder Brain
Can Cognitive Reserve Lead To Mental Fitness Later in Life?
Premise: Americans don't want to live forever, but we want lives that are healthy as long as possible during our actuarily-predictable lifetimes.
See A Philosopher's Case Against Death | The MIT Press Reader
That extension of healthy aging into later decades requires a sustained physical and mental fitness. How, then to postpone brain changes that diminish the dignity, abilities, independence and quality of life of the elder?
Extending our abilities to remember, to associate and to make appropriate decisions in our eighties or nineties (and avoiding other too-common disorders that diminish quality of life in later decades) seems to be a more desirable outcome than living to be 150.
This mental fitness in later decades is being referred to as COGNITIVE RESERVE (CR). Individuals with a high CR are better able to cope with the inevitable toll of age-related neurodegenerative and vascular changes.
And so, bottom line, you should be interested in CR to sustain your own personal brain.
Is a 74 year old brain capable of bettering itself? The jury is out. But it is the younger folk you know and love, whose lives are mostly ahead of them, who could benefit from this understanding.
How will the way they live, eat, socialize, create, work and play impact their cognitive prowess when they are my age?
How CR Was First Revealed
Here's how this topic rose up into the radar about 30 years ago (Katzman et al. (1989) and it has been studied more and more ever since:
Studies indicate that roughly 25%–32% of individuals who at autopsy show plaques and neurofibrillary tangles characteristic of AD are not diagnosed with dementia in their lifetime.
The development of the reserve theory hinges on the ability to understand complex interactions among risk and protective lifestyle factors. Reserve proposes that certain environmental factors can explain and predict why some individuals seem to respond more favorably in the presence of pathology than others.
So we have a name for it.
But how to account for a demented brain upon autopsy that nevertheless allows the owner to have lived a cognitively-normal life in their later decades?
Well the answer is not simple, the human-subject sample sizes of research studies to date are small, and the interactions between brain biology and lifestyle and experiential factors will take a lot of teasing signal from noise. But that work is underway, and boomers should be interested. But PRE-boomers, even more so. And that's your children and grandchildren.
I'll share a few gleanings from my poking around, and you will have at least be made aware of CR, and do what you will with that nugget.
Cognitive decline happens as the brain ages. It can happen sooner or it can happen later.
Cognitive reserve hypothesis holds that individuals with greater CR can sustain more pathogenic changes in the brain prior to manifesting clinical signs of cognitive impairment.
WHY IS THAT?
With a broad brush, elders with higher CR tend to have strong social networks; have more years of education; have had challenging and variable (vs simple and routine) working lives; have multiple interests and cognitively stimulating leisure activities; and take on new challenges (learning a language, playing music etc;) have strong verbal skills; and score high on "Creativity Measures."
How we live our lives in our 30s and 40s can extend or diminish brain health decades later.
OTOH, there are scores of "learning companies" who will sell those of us already well-aged, who might not be CR superheroes, a purported way to stay on top of our game, regardless of the relentless brain insults by Father Time.
Caveat emptor. My understanding is that, at this late date, these brain teasers, puzzles and games can increase your scores for the specific games but not necessarily change your overall cognitive performance in memory or executive function areas where you might not be strong.
Just Me…
I take the "brain is a muscle" approach and watch for opportunities to "lift more weight" by forcing myself to PAY ATTENTION, for instance, even to otherwise passive entertainment on screened devices:
Remember character's names and real names the actors who pop up in today’s movie from previous decades; remember pivotal moments that shift the plot; pick out features that would tell the year-span for that style of car, dress, furniture.
Learn more bird calls and song lyrics by memory. Create opportunities to remember and rehearse those facts to retard the forgetting curve.
Curation Aids Cognitive Reserve. Maybe.
The curation of information resources and then writing about those crucial topics, as I've done since 2002, has been a long-term exercise in memory, association and sense-making.
In addition to enjoying the community of so many wonderful folk that the writing introduced me to, this public journaling, hopefully, has also been sustaining some degree of my mental plasticity, flexibility, recall and organization. Or not. Still a win.
So thank you very much, your readership encourages me to stay awake, pay attention, and take notes; and learn something new most every day.
â–º What is cognitive reserve, and how do we increase it?
Good information Fred! Thanks.