Brain structure and phenotypic profile of superagers

• Autores: Marta Garo Pascual
• Directores de la Tesis: Bryan Andrew Strange (dir. tes.), Javier de Felipe Oroquieta (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2024
• Idioma: inglés
• Número de páginas: 150
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Estructura cerebral y perfil fenotípico de los superagers
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
• Resumen

  • Reaching old age with an episodic memory comparable to that of a person 30 years younger is possible, and this ability to remember past experiences as if we were younger has been conceptualised as superageing. The study of the superager phenotype is an alternative strategy to the numerous efforts devoted to curbing the pathological deterioration of episodic memory that characterises Alzheimer's disease. In this thesis, four complementary studies have been carried out on a large sample of superagers and typical older adults of the same age selected from the longitudinal cohort of the Vallecas Project. In the first study, a cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of the grey matter reveals a larger volume in the medial temporal lobe, the basal forebrain and the motor thalamus, as well as a slower rate of atrophy in superagers. A machine learning approach shows that higher movement speed and better mental health are the most differentiating factors in superagers. The second study replicates the cross-sectional and longitudinal examination for white matter microstructure using diffusion measures and reveals that age-related changes in the brains of superagers occur at a slower rate than in typical older adults. In the third study, telomere length was measured in blood cells and superagers show shorter telomere length compared to typical older adults. The fourth study correlates brain structure with episodic learning rate in the cognitively healthy sample from the first visit of the Vallecas Project and extends this analysis by showing that superagers have a faster learning rate relative to typical older adults. This thesis advances the field of episodic memory ageing by identifying a large sample of superagers who had neuroimaging data with up to 5 years of annual follow-up and a wide range of demographic, clinical and lifestyle variables. Overall, this thesis provides valuable insights into the brain structure of superagers and their ageing mechanism, as well as the factors associated with this phenotype, offering new perspectives on how to preserve episodic memory function at advanced ages