Memory aging and brain maintenance.

By Lars Nyberg, Martin Lövdén, K. Riklund, Ulman E. R. Lindenberger, Lars Bäckman. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012

1,111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Episodic memory and working memory decline with advancing age. Nevertheless, large-scale population-based studies document well-preserved memory functioning in some older individuals. The influential ‘reserve’ notion holds that individual differences in brain characteristics or in the manner people process tasks allow some individuals to cope better than others with brain pathology and hence show preserved memory performance. Here, we discuss a complementary concept, that of brain maintenance (or relative lack of brain pathology), and argue that it constitutes the primary determinant of successful memory aging. We discuss evidence for brain maintenance at different levels: cellular, neurochemical, gray- and white-matter integrity, and systems-level activation patterns. Various genetic and lifestyle factors support brain maintenance in aging and interventions may be designed to promote maintenance of brain structure and function in late life.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13f8d7de4bb4d6fa430d63c657d1f3b627e8d72b

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Education and Cognitive Functioning Across the Life Span (2020, background): “The notion of brain maintenance implies that between-persons differences in cognitive changes can be linked to between-persons differences in taskrelevant aspects of the brain’s chemistry, structure, and function (Nyberg & Lindenberger, in press; Nyberg et al., 2012).”
What is normal in normal aging? Effects of Aging, Amyloid and Alzheimer’s Disease on the Cerebral Cortex and the Hippocampus (2014, background): “…should we understand the fact that three of the major symptoms of AD observed in vivo – disruption of episodic memory function (Koivisto et al., 1995; Nyberg et al., 2012), brain atrophy (Raz et al., 2005; Driscoll et al., 2009; Fjell et al., 2009a) and accumulation of amyloid protein (Morris et…”
Age-Related Changes in 1/f Neural Electrophysiological Noise (2015, background): “…likelihood that our cognitive faculties will decline (Gazzaley et al., 2007; Salthouse, 2010), our neural and behavioral response times (RTs) will be slower and more variable (Salthouse, 2010), our memories less certain (Nyberg et al., 2012), and our attention less focused (Gazzaley et al., 2005).”