University of Illinois Beckman Institute postdoctoral researcher Agnieszka Burzynska and her colleagues analyzed the brain and cognition of Olga Kotelko, a 93-year-old track-and-field athlete. Burzynska is now a professor at Colorado State University. Credit: L. Brian Stauffer
1st glimpse of potential effects of Exercise on the brains and cognitive abilities of the ‘oldest old.’ In the summer of 2012, Olga Kotelko, a 93-year-old Canadian track-and-field athlete with more than 30 world records in her age group, submitted to an in-depth analysis of her brain.
A retired teacher and mother of two, Kotelko started her athletic career late in life: slow-pitch softball at age 65, and at 77 switched to track-and-field events. By the time of her death in 2014, she had won 750 gold medals in her age group in World Masters Athletics events, and had set new world records in the 100-meter, 200-meter, high jump, long jump, javelin, discus, shot put and hammer events.
Lacking a peer group of reasonably healthy nonagenarians for comparison, the researchers decided to compare Kotelko with a group of 58 healthy, low-active women who were 60 to 78 years old. In one long day at the lab, Kotelko submitted to an MRI brain scan, a cardiorespiratory fitness test on a treadmill and cognitive tests. “During dinner after the long day of testing, I asked Olga if she was tired, and she replied, ‘I rarely get tired,'” Kramer said. “The decades-younger graduate students who tested her, however, looked exhausted.”
The women in the comparison group underwent the same tests and scans.
“Her brain did not seem to be, in general, very shrunken, and her ventricles did not seem to be enlarged,” Burzynska said. On the other hand, she had obvious signs of advanced aging in the white-matter tracts of some brain regions, Burzynska said. As a whole, however, Kotelko’s white-matter tracts were remarkably intact – comparable to those of women decades younger, the researchers found. And the white-matter tracts in one region of her brain – the genu of the corpus callosum, which connects the right and left hemispheres at the very front of the brain – were in great shape, Burzynska said.
“Olga had the highest measure of white-matter integrity in that part of the brain, even higher than those younger females, which was very surprising,” she said. These white-matter tracts serve a region of the brain that is engaged in tasks – such as reasoning, planning and self-control – that are known to decline fastest in aging, Burzynska said.
Kotelko performed worse on cognitive tests than the younger women, but better than other adults her own age who had been tested in an independent study. Her hippocampus was smaller than the younger participants, but larger than expected given her age. The new findings are only a very limited, first step toward calculating the effects of exercise on cognition in the oldest old, she said.
“We have only one Olga and only at one time point, so it’s difficult to arrive at very solid conclusions,” Burzynska said. “But I think it’s very exciting to see someone who is highly functioning at 93, possessing numerous world records in the athletic field and actually having very high integrity in a brain region that is very sensitive to aging. I hope it will encourage people that even as we age, our brains remain plastic. We have more and more evidence for that.”
Watch a video of her accomplishments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NO33wpkVFo
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/uoia-tna081715.php
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