Ageing has arguably always been a puzzle. There is the 82-year-old part-time farmer down the road who remains light on his feet, while his 60-something accountant neighbour gets short of breath walking from car to office.<\/p>\n
According \u200dto a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University in the US state of Tennessee, \u201csuperagers\u201d such as the farmer could have an innate advantage over the prematurely old, at least when it comes to cognition.<\/p>\n
According to the university, those in their 80s with brain function \u201ccomparable to people 20 or 30 years younger\u201d \u2060are much less likely to carry the dreaded APOE4 gene than those of the same age bracket exhibiting signs of mental decline.<\/p>\n
Not only are the forever-young octogenarians 68 per cent less likely to harbour \u201cthe gene that nobody wants\u201d than peers with dementia, but they are 19 per cent less likely to have it than the \u201ccognitively normal\u201d of the same age.<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s findings were published earlier this month in \u200dthe journal Alzheimer\u2019s & Dementia and were based on a study of around 18,000 people.<\/p>\n
The results carried even \u200dmore good news for superagers: they were almost 30 per cent more likely to have APOE2 \u2013 \u201cthe variant you\u2019d want\u201d, according to Vanderbilt \u2013 than those who aged as expected, and \u200c103 per cent more likely than those with dementia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ageing has arguably always been a puzzle. There is the 82-year-old part-time farmer down the road who remains…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[137637,137639,3555,137638,137636,60785,137641,5303,163,4210,85,46,137640,137635,132842],"class_list":{"0":"post-261587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-alzheimers-dementia-the-journal-of-the-alzheimers-association","9":"tag-alzheimers-research-uk","10":"tag-alzheimers-disease","11":"tag-amyloid-plaques-and-tau","12":"tag-apoe2","13":"tag-apoe4","14":"tag-apoe4-gene","15":"tag-dementia","16":"tag-health","17":"tag-high-blood-pressure","18":"tag-il","19":"tag-israel","20":"tag-journal-of-clinical-endocrinology-metabolism","21":"tag-superagers","22":"tag-vanderbilt-university"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}