Laura Pizzuto, 78, of Seattle admits she loses her words every now and then. An avid gardener, she will sometimes forget the name of a familiar plant. “But I know how to look things up,” she says. “Or I can go to the library or call a friend.” Occasional memory lapses are not going to slow down this professional artist. “I want to keep myself going so I can work and enjoy my grandchildren,” she says. To that end, Pizzuto is doing everything she can to keep her brain, as well as the rest of her body, in top shape. The odds are decidedly in her favor. For one thing, she’s blessed with good genes. But she also finds fulfillment in her painting, is active in her community, eats lots of vegetables and exercises regularly. According to the latest research on aging, those are exactly the sorts of things we all should be doing to help maintain our ability to remember, reason, make decisions and learn. There are even tantalizing hints that those healthful habits may also prevent or delay Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia—although that conclusion is controversial. “I would phrase it differently,” says Marilyn Albert, director of the division of cognitive neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. “What the studies have done is to take people who are middle-aged and elderly and look at what maintains good brain health.” No one is suggesting that a crossword puzzle a day will keep senility at bay or that somehow it’s your fault if your mental capacity fails. But given how quickly the average age of Americans is rising and how much the risk of dementia leaps with advancing years, finding anything that delays cognitive decline even a little would be of enormous value. No wonder research looking for links between lifestyle and a healthier brain has been booming in recent years. Later this month the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia will publish a long-awaited report prepared for the National Institutes of Health that summarizes what scientists know and don’t know about improving cognitive and emotional health in the elderly. And the fourth major study on the role of exercise will be published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the Center for Health Studies in Seattle . Along the way, neurologists have discovered that the brain is much more adaptable as it ages than they realized. They have determined that the so-called plasticity of the brain, which allows the formation of new neurons as well as new connections between those neurons, can last a lifetime. “As far as our brains are concerned, learning something new or even retrieving something from memory is a plasticity response,” says Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging. It may get harder as you age, but if you can teach an old brain new tricks, you might, just might, also be able to keep it functioning well into the 90s.
