By Curt Pesmen
When Sandra Pesmen turned 79, she didn’t waste time thinking about her next birthday: “I don’t want a party just for turning 80,” she told her two children (of which I am one). “We should make it a book party, too.” The only trouble was, that there was no book (yet).
So, the longtime journalist and author of two books, Pesmen, now 93, set out to write her third — a work-life memoir — start-to-finish in seven months. Stairway to the Stars: John Travolta, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers…and Me recounted years of celebrity and feature reporting at The Chicago Daily News. It was sent to the printer before she turned 79¾.
That was one of my first clues that my mother’s pattern of aging wasn’t exactly normal. Especially since some of her friends had begun to slow down physically, mentally, or both. This 25-year treadmill and neighborhood-walk warrior soon started talking about “maybe getting some younger friends.” She wasn’t kidding.
We’ve long heard about The New Longevity: living longer, better, fitter. But less well-known is the growing population of “SuperAgers,” those individuals who appear at ages 80+ to possess the mental acuity of those in their 50s or 60s. Many neurology, gerontology, and aging research institutions are studying healthy “overperforming” individuals – and brains – in medical settings (rather than placing a sole focus on Alzheimer’s and related dementia disorders). What can we learn from these outliers?
“If we’re constantly talking about what’s going wrong in aging, it’s not capturing the full spectrum of what’s happening in the older adult population,” says Emily Rogalski, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at the University of Chicago, who published an early study on so-called SuperAgers while at Northwestern University in 2012. The term SuperAging, itself, grew out of those research labs at Northwestern.
Beyond challenging long-held notions of aging and decline, Dr. Rogalski’s study of high-achieving brains has jump-started lots of new research that will further her and her colleagues’ early SuperAger findings.
Rogalski now directs the Healthy Aging & Alzheimer’s Research Care (HAARC) Center at the University of Chicago. There are four additional research sites in the U.S. and one in Canada, all focused on the notion of SuperAgers.
In the Northwestern SuperAger labs, Pesmen sat for a series of cognitive memory, brain challenge, and drawing tests over a span of 10 years. “Sometimes I’m repeating lists of words; then again 15 minutes or maybe an hour later, to see how many I recall,” she says. “Other times, I’m counting aloud, backward, while subtracting ‘seven’ each time.”
They also test how well Pesmen “moves” – walking to-and-fro around the lab, looking for signs of steady/unsteady gait, and how swiftly she (and other subjects) walks and turns, overall. Swiftness, steadiness, and gait are all “markers” of aging.
“This [research] gives us, individually, opportunities to change our personal expectations around aging,” adds Rogalski,” and potentially live into our fuller potential and to value our aging colleagues, our aging members of society, a bit more.”
Rogalski made the media rounds after a key report in April in the Journal of Neuroscience reported that SuperAgers don’t merely look, walk, or engage differently than their peers. Dr. Rogalski and colleagues have found that their brains shrink less — measurably less — than average octogenarians, or even septuagenarians. Possibly 50% less.
What’s more, in terms of molecular biology, SuperAgers so far seem to have an apparent abundance of von Economo neurons, compared with their same-age peers. These spindly, tree-branch-type cells are thought to foster networking behavior related to “social intelligence,” and also are found in dolphins, whales, elephants, and higher apes. All social creatures. When SuperAgers report their lifestyle characteristics to the research teams, they are found to be extremely social. Scientists don’t yet know how much of this might be nature versus nurture, along the (long) lifespans of the study subjects.
Another neuro finding that may offer important strategies in the future has to do with the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. By virtue of repeated MRI and other imaging scans, it has been shown that SuperAgers have thicker, more prominent cortical layers than typical people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. It opens up the question, ‘Is this finding a genetic or lifestyle characteristic that seems to offer protection against key, age-related decline?’
In Pesmen’s case, she says that since she was a child, she has had a visual — not necessarily ‘photographic’ — memory. “When I remember stories, work or family stories, I can remember who was sitting next to whom, and in what restaurant, maybe 50, 60 years ago. And it’s in color!”
Another intriguing finding has to do with exercise among the 80+ group. It’s still too early to focus on specific numbers of miles, steps per day, or daily Iyengar yoga sessions for the rest of us. But, on average, a SuperAger is more active than others in their age cohort. Cardio and sports medicine research teams of the past may have focused too stringently on the benefits of aerobic training for the heart, and not recognized the benefits to the brain.
Globally, one recent finding in Neurology, gleaned from a large study in West China’s Biomedical Big Data Center and other labs, reasoned that regular exercise or “vigorous activity” can reduce risk for dementia by some 35%. Not a small sum, if this data can be verified and repeated.
“The last time I ‘walked’ for them [at the SuperAgers study],” says Pesmen, “the researchers said I was ‘amazing.’ I told them I’ve been on the treadmill since about age 55. Maybe four or five miles a week.”
Not long ago, when I called my SuperAger-author-journo mother, she was weighing a career change. After a 60-year writing career, and very soon after a successful three-month treatment for lung cancer, she’d decided to try stand-up comedy. Over a couple of months, she had banged out 35 to 40 minutes worth of jokes, wry observations, and feel-good asides aimed at the 60- or 80-plus crowd. She was trying to decide whether it would be best to present her “Stand-Up/Sit-Down” Comedy Act (“…because at 93 — who can stand that long?”) in person to senior center audiences — or whether she should merely introduce the “show” live, then exit stage left while a professionally-produced video of her 40-minute act unspooled on a screen in the activity room.
As she was planning her event at the senior center, the event planner commented that she looked “great for her age.” And that she could “pass for 72, not 92.”
On cue she replied, “Do you know how old you have to be for that to be a compliment?”
Curt Pesmen, an author and former Esquire writer and editor, wrote the book, How a Man Ages, for Esquire Press in the 1980s, at the age of 26.
