American gerontologists from the State University of New York at Stony Brook studied how aging of brain cells affects their cognitive functions. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences (JGBS).
Experts decided to find out why people of the same age may have different levels of mental abilities, including memory and information processing speed.
According to scientists, this situation is explained by the human biological age, also known as epigenetic aging. This parameter reflects the physiological state of the body, and not the number of years lived.
During the study, gerontologists analyzed data from 142 people between the ages of 25 and 65. Participants were administered cognitive tests on smartphones for 14 days. The tasks allowed us to assess the speed of information processing and the state of working memory (the brain system in which we store new impressions). After two weeks of testing, volunteers donated blood for DNA testing.
The results showed that people whose biological age was higher than their chronological age performed worse, on average, in terms of information processing speed and working memory efficiency.
Researchers also examined how people’s performance changed from one moment to the next. They found that people with higher biological age showed greater variability in their cognitive performance, potentially indicating less stable cognitive abilities.
Although biological age showed a clear relationship with cognitive ability, chronological age was also a significant predictor in a different way. Older participants tended to show less variability in their cognitive abilities; This suggests that as they get older, their mental functions may become more stable, although not as quickly.
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