14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that the brain becomes lazier as people age is a secret to no one, yet scientists know very little about the root causes that lead to bodily aging. In a new investigation, experts at the University of Bristol were able to identify a novel mechanism involved in slowing down neural processing.
The latter is one of the main reasons why the brain starts to lose its abilities as it grows old. Neurons begin to relay electrical signals from one another more clumsily, and slower. This eventually leads to a host of negative side-effects, researchers say.
In a paper published in this week's issue of the renowned scientific journal Neurobiology of Aging, experts say that the novel mechanism they discovered plays a role in the decline of cognitive functions, such as for example memory loss and speech impairment.
Despite the new study, the fact of the matter remains that experts still don't know why the brain starts to age in the first place. According to results published in 2011, it would appear that the earliest signs of cognitive decline could be detected up to 50 years before symptoms start to show.
UB School of Physiology and Pharmacology professor Andy Randall and Dr. Jon Brown explain that the cellular mechanism they identified is involved with a natural type of neural activity impairment, which occurs during normal aging.
One of the things the researchers analyzed was nerve cells' excitability, a property that dictates how fast the neurons produce action potentials. These travel through the entire length of the cell, and then get passed on to other neurons along the way.
This ability is absolutely essential for communication within the entire nervous system. What the UB team found was that action potentials are triggered with increased difficulty as the brain ages.
“Much of our work is about understanding dysfunctional electrical signaling in the diseased brain, in particular Alzheimer’s disease. We began to question, however, why even the healthy brain can slow down once you reach my age,” Randall explains.
“Previous investigations elsewhere have described age-related changes in processes that are triggered by action potentials, but our findings are significant because they show that generating the action potential in the first place is harder work in aged brain cells,” he concludes.