New study contradicts assumption that brains shrink with age

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090915/sc_livescience/dobrainsshrinkasweage

Do Brains Shrink As We Age?

As we get older, our brains get smaller, or at least that's what many scientists believe. But a new study contradicts this assumption, concluding that when older brains are "healthy" there is little brain deterioration, and that only when people experience cognitive decline do their brains show significant signs of shrinking.

The results suggest that many previous studies may have overestimated how much our brains shrink as we age, possibly because they failed to exclude people who were starting to develop brain diseases, such as dementia, that would lead to brain decay, or atrophy.

"The main issue is that maybe healthy people do not have as much atrophy as we always thought they had," said Saartje Burgmans, the lead author of the study and a PhD candidate at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Burgmans and her colleagues wondered what would happen if they were able to screen out all of the people with so-called "preclinical" cognitive diseases. Using information collected for Holland's Maastricht Aging Study, the researchers analyzed data from 65 "healthy" individuals who did not show signs of dementia, Parkinson's disease or stroke and who were monitored for a period of nine years. Participants were on average 69 years old at the study's start.

Every three years, participants completed neuropsychological tests, which were designed to assess their cognition. They also underwent a brain MRI scan. From the test results, the researchers divided the participants into two groups: a "healthy" group of 35 people, who showed no loss of mental abilities, and another group of 30 people who showed substantial cognitive decline, but did not have dementia.

Then, they analyzed the brain scans, looking at the size of seven regions associated with cognition. In the healthy group, age did not have a significant effect on brain size. In the other group, there was a large effect in all seven brain areas - older participants had significantly smaller brain areas than younger ones. "What we found is that when you exclude all those people are suspicious for preclinical disease, and you just look at the healthy people who don't have any suspicious cognitive decline, then you see that there is a very small age effect in this group," said Burgmans.

No.

They swell.

We get fat heads.

I believe there are several papers out there (probably in the journal:Sleep) that show that the brain shrinks with chronic sleep deprivation...

;-)

Aging Republicans. Limited brain to begin with....

There was no brain there to lose.
W. Bush lost his brain through excessive drinking and cocaine use.
Glenn Beck? The self admitted dry drunk, drug user speaks for himself

so who knows, really?

(Perhaps we could provide some end-of-life counseling for them and get them to donate their pea brains to skiance for study by skiantists)