Aging and the Alzheimer's disease by Daniela Simkova

Have you ever thought of what causes forgetting things which you would like to remember? Didn't you think that higher age could be related to loosing your memories? Researchers, Randy Buckner, a Harvard professor and Howard Hughes, a Medical Institute researcher, studied deterioration of brain at Harvard University. The study was specialized on the differences between the clinical deterioration and the one caused by aging. Randy Buckner and Howard Hughes said: "We're trying to understand the edge of that boundary between normal aging and Alzheimer's disease." The study is based on the images of brain took by a PET technique, to detect presence of special chemical, amyloid, which is typical for the Alzheimer disease. The researchers took brain scans of older people aged over 60 and on contrary of younger people aged of 35 and younger. They compared all the brain scans and found out that some brain systems, it's not an ordinance, are less coordinated in higher age: "It looks like it is an effect of normal aging independent of Alzheimer's disease," said Randy Buckner. Brain contains brain structure, which is called white matter tracks, that carry information from different parts of brain. Researchers found out that white matter tracks were impaired in the older group of people, whereas in the younger group of people were not deteriorated. A graduate student in Buckner's lab, Jessica Andrews-Hanna said: "In young adults, the front of the brain was pretty well in sync with the back of the brain. In older adults this was not the case. The regions became out of sync and they were less correlated with each other." This could be the explanation of why some people do well with the Alzheimer's disease and others don't. Brains of some people are better prepared for the aging and therefore for the disease as well.

by Daniela Simkova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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