(NewsNation) — Singer-songwriter Billie Eilish once wrote, “I’m getting older. I think I’m aging well.”
Aging is a part of life, and researchers have begun creating a roadmap of how getting older affects brain cells differently.
Aging is the biggest risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s, which nearly 7 million people in the U.S. have. Some brain cells are more sensitive to the aging process, according to a recent study published in the medical journal “Nature.”
“This new map may fundamentally alter the way scientists think about how aging affects the brain and also provide a guide for developing new treatments for aging-related brain diseases,” said Dr. Richard J. Hodes, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging.
Scientists studied individual brain cells of 2-month-old and 18-month-old mice, analyzing the genetic activity in different regions of the brain.
Cells lining the third ventricle, a region that enables the process of producing hormones that control the body’s basic needs, were the most sensitive to aging. Those cells “had the greatest changes in genetic activity with age, including increases in immunity genes and decreases in genes associated with neuronal circuitry.”
This observation is in line with previous studies.
“For years scientists studied the effects of aging on the brain mostly one cell at a time … (Now), researchers can study how aging affects much of the whole brain,” said Dr. John Ngai to the National Institutes of Health.