"Cognitive Reserve" - Maintaining Cognition Even With Alzheimer's Pathologies

Mind Mastery With Back To Basics

This study screams out HOPE.

When I first read it, I called up Karen and almost shouted, this study will reduce some of our excessive worrying about brain power as we age!

This stunning study shows that even if your brain has Alzheimer’s pathological processes going on, with tissues shrinking and getting excessively tangled with poorly shaped proteins, you can still be relatively cognitively capable.

These authors were Klodian Dhana, MD, PhD, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago in a collaborative effort.

They tracked aging folks for almost a quarter of a century, tested their cognition, tracked their life styles, and when they died, did autopsies on their brains.

Amazing research.

The authors discuss that as most of us age, we all have some progressive accumulation of dementia-related brain pathologies, such as a build up of beta-amyloid. and tau fibers. Our brain tissue gets messy.

But how bad can our brain tissue get, with us still being capable of having a fairly normal life?

This is called “cognitive reserve”.