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Even as you get older, your brain will keep making new nerve cells. This news seems to be nothing, but it is actually a very important discovery.
For decades, the scientific community believed that the aging brain would stop making new cells. But recent research provides strong evidence to the contrary. A new paper published in Cell Stem Cells on April 5 shows that the aging brain produces as many brain cells as the young brain. Dr Maura Boldrini, a neurobiologist at Columbia University, is the lead author of this study. He said, "When I was a medical student, my teacher told us that the brain would stop making new cells. Now all this has been redefined. 」
Boldrini told Live Science that the initial experimental results on mice gave them a chance to doubt their previous cognition: even the brains of old mice would produce new nerve cells. After that, Boldrini began to shift the research focus from mice to humans, which was the first formal study of human brain cells on the issue of human longevity.
Boldrini and her colleagues studied the brains of 28 people between the ages of 14 and 79. They are all healthy and have no disease problems. ("Health" is a relative noun. The brains of these subjects have died, but there is no evidence of any major disease. Moreover, they are not from drug addicts or people who have received antidepressant treatment-researchers believe that if the above two situations exist, brain cells will further increase due to external factors. These brains come from the donor brain bank in Colombia. The donor brains are all preserved in the same way and have detailed medical records.
Boldrini and her colleagues sliced the hippocampus, an area of the brain that is very important for learning and memory, and counted the number of newly formed cells under the microscope. These cells are not yet fully mature. This part of the research work is particularly challenging. Boldrini said: "It's not difficult to count new cells with mouse brains, but human brains are bigger and more complicated. Researchers can only count cells under a microscope using specialized computer software.
Compared with young people, the brains of the elderly are not completely unchanged. Although they have as many new cells as young people's brains, the formation of new blood vessels is decreasing, and new connections between blood vessels are not formed as fast as new brain cells.
However, it is worth noting that the research on the formation mechanism of brain newborn cells in the elderly is far from mature. An article published in the journal Nature on March 7th questioned the assertion that an aging brain can form new cells. In the study of diseased and healthy brains, the author of this paper found that at the beginning of adolescence, the production of new brain cells dropped sharply, and no new cells were detected in adult brains.
Boldrini said that the difference between the research results obtained by her team and those published in Nature can be traced back to the differences in brains and research methods used by different research teams. Specifically, the brains used in the paper of Nature come from a wider range of people, with different health conditions and different technologies for storing brains. These variables may destroy new brain cells in the brain.
Boldrini and her team further suggested that the ability of hippocampus to continue to produce new cells may be a key feature of a healthy brain in old age. This will provide important theoretical support for us to study human brain health and even develop related technologies to maintain brain vitality.
Reference:
Scientists find very young cells in very old brains.