Researchers Find Nonagerian's Brain Active Due To Exercise

By R. Siva Kumar - 18 Aug '15 12:14PM

It happened in the summer of 2012. Olga Kotelko was 93 years old, a Canadian track-and-field athlete who had over 30 world records in her age group. She visited the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, and gave an in-depth analysis of her brain, according to sciencedaily.

The conclusions were reported in the journal Neurocase, giving an insight into the impact of exercise on the brain and cognitive skills of the "oldest old."

She was a retired teacher with two children. Beginning her athletic career late in life, she started a slow-pitch softball at 65 years. When she was 77 years, she shifted to track-and-field events, taking the help of a coach.

She died last year. She already had won 750 gold medals in her age group in World Masters Athletics events, and had even reached a few novel world records in the "100-meter, 200-meter, high jump, long jump, javelin, discus, shot put and hammer events".

As she did not have healthy peers to be compared with, the scientists pitched her against 58 "healthy, low-active women who were 60 to 78 years old".

"In our studies, we often collect data from adults who are between 60 and 80 years old, and we have trouble finding participants who are 75 to 80 and relatively healthy," said U. of I. postdoctoral researcher Agnieszka Burzynska, the lead analyst. Few studies have concentrated on the "oldest old," she said.

"Although it is tough to generalize from a single study participant to other individuals, we felt very fortunate to have an opportunity to study the brain and cognition of such an exceptional individual," said Beckman Institute director Art Kramer, an author of the new study.

It was a long day of tests. "During dinner after the long day of testing, I asked Olga if she was tired, and she replied, 'I rarely get tired,'" Kramer said. "The decades-younger graduate students who tested her, however, looked exhausted."

The scientists wanted to probe whether her athleticism had slowed down or maybe countered the aging of the mind. "In general, the brain shrinks with age," Burzynska said. There were fluids in the gaps between the brain and the skull, in which the ventricles became bigger, she said.

"The cortex, the outermost layer of cells where all of our thinking takes place, that also gets thinner," she said. There was some white matter that carried nerve signals between the areas and lost their "structural and functional integrity" over time. The hippocampus, which is vital for good memory, also shrinks, usually.

Kotelko's brain showed that an active lifestyle can keep the mind active. "Her brain did not seem to be, in general, very shrunken, and her ventricles did not seem to be enlarged," Burzynska said.

"Olga had quite a lot white-matter hyperintensities, which are markers of unspecific white-matter damage," she said. People over the age of 65 years exhibit them. "Olga had the highest measure of white-matter integrity in that part of the brain, even higher than those younger females, which was very surprising."

Although she was worse on cognitive tests than the younger women, she was better than other adults of her own age. "She was quicker at responding to the cognitive tasks than other adults in their 90s," Burzynska said. "And on memory, she was much better than they were."

However, these are only preliminary tests.

"We have only one Olga and only at one time point, so it's difficult to arrive at very solid conclusions," Burzynska said. "But I think it's very exciting to see someone who is highly functioning at 93, possessing numerous world records in the athletic field and actually having very high integrity in a brain region that is very sensitive to ageing. I hope it will encourage people that even as we age, our brains remain plastic. We have more and more evidence for that."