JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Once we get past about age 40, even a healthy brain begins to lose a step or two. Reaction times get slower. It's harder to remember everything on your shopping list. But scientists are looking for ways to minimize these changes. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Memory lapses and slower thinking can be signs of a disease like Alzheimer's. But Matt Huentelman of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix says usually they just mean someone's brain is getting older.
MATT HUENTELMAN: Both of those things, memory and processing speed, change with age in a normal group of people.
HAMILTON: Huentelman should know. He helps run MindCrowd, a free online cognitive test that's been taken by more than 700,000 people of all ages. Huentelman says about a thousand of those people had test scores indicating their brain was exceptional.
HUENTELMAN: The way that we define an exceptional brain is someone who performs at a level that is about 30 years younger than them when it comes to a memory test or a processing speed test.
HAMILTON: Huentelman says good genes are one factor, but he and a team of researchers are looking for other differences.
HUENTELMAN: We want to study these exceptional performers because we think they can tell us what the rest of us should be doing.
HAMILTON: Early results suggest that sleep and maintaining cardiovascular health are a good start. Huentelman was one of several dozen researchers who met in Miami this summer to discuss healthy brain aging. The event was hosted by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation. Another speaker was Dr. Christian Agudelo, a sleep neurologist at the University of Miami.
CHRISTIAN AGUDELO: I think the value of sleep and sleep deprivation became true to me when I had kids.
HAMILTON: Agudelo's kids are 4 and 6 now. He says his own experience is consistent with his research on the relationship between sleep and cognitive decline.
AGUDELO: The better you sleep, the better your brain health is going to be, both structurally and functionally.
HAMILTON: Agudelo says the key is getting high-quality sleep, which allows the brain to cycle through all the sleep stages. Researchers can measure how well a person is sleeping by monitoring their brainwave patterns, but Agudelo says people usually know when they've had a good night's rest.
AGUDELO: You go to sleep, you wake up and you feel like that experience was worthwhile. You feel refreshed. And we all, hopefully, have experienced that.
HAMILTON: Ensuring high-quality sleep is tricky, but Agudelo says you can improve the odds with certain behaviors.
AGUDELO: Waking up at the same time every single day and aligning our sleep rhythms with the rhythm of the sun. Being active both socially and physically so we can fall asleep more easily and more deeply.
HAMILTON: Dr. Charles DeCarli, a neurologist at the University of California, Davis, says brain aging is also affected by vascular risk factors like blood pressure, cholesterol levels and diabetes.
CHARLES DECARLI: We tend to think about them as affecting the heart, sometimes the blood vessels in the legs or stroke, not so much as it impacts on the brain itself.
HAMILTON: But DeCarli's research on thousands of people 65 and older found a strong correlation.
DECARLI: The size of the brain, the shape of the brain, the tissue integrity of the brain looks older in people who have these risk factors than those who do not have them.
HAMILTON: So DeCarli and a team of researchers are studying whether it's possible to protect the brain by aggressively treating conditions that affect the circulatory system.
DECARLI: The question is, if you have these diseases and they're well controlled, will you have a younger-looking brain? And the answer seems to be yes.
HAMILTON: Researchers say other ways to keep your brain youthful include avoiding smoking, limiting alcohol and getting lots of exercise.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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