BALTIMORE, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- Researchers working with rats have found that still "sharp" older brains store and encode memories differently than younger brains.
The discovery, reported by a Johns Hopkins team in the issue of Nature Neuroscience, could lead to the development of new preventive treatments and therapies based on what healthy older brains are doing, rather than on the less relevant, younger brain model.
"We found that aged rats with preserved cognitive abilities are not biologically equivalent to young rats in some of the basic machinery that neurons use to encode and store information in the brain," said study co-author Michela Gallagher, chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins' Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Researchers compared the brains of 6-month-old rats with those of 2-year-old rodents that had performed in the "young" range on various learning tasks.
The team found that while the older rats with compromised cognition had brains that had lost the ability to adjust the force of those synaptic communications, the older rats whose memories remained sharp still had that capacity.
