Brains of ‘super agers’ are still strong producers of new neurons

Nature News · Feb 25, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Adults whose brains still have strong neuron production seem to have better memory and cognitive function than do those in whom the ability wanes, finds a study published today in Nature1. The authors examined brain samples from deceased donors ranging from young adults to ‘super agers’ — people older than 80 with exceptional memory.She lived to 117: what her genes and lifestyle tell us about longevityThey found that young and old adults with healthy cognition generated neurons, a process called neurogenesis, at high levels for their age. The team estimated that the new neurons made up only a small fraction — 0.01% — of those in the hippocampus, a brain region that’s essential for memory. By contrast, in people experiencing cognitive decline, including individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, neurogenesis seems to falter: the researchers spotted fewer developing, or immature, neurons in those brain samples.Surprisingly, a group of ‘super agers’ had an even higher number of immature neurons than did other groups, and significantly more than did those with Alzheimer’s. However, the group sizes were small, so the findings were not all statistically significant.Maura Boldrini Dupont, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York City, says that the small size of the groups — each had ten or fewer individuals — is a reason to take the results with a grain of salt.Understanding the tools that the brain uses to generate neurons and maintain cognitive function in old age could help researchers to develop drugs that induce neurogenesis in people with cognitive decline, says co-author Orly Lazarov, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois Chicago.Controversy over neurogenesisThe findings support the idea that people’s brains continue to generate neurons even in adulthood. But that idea hasn’t always been accepted.In the early 1900s, neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal suggested that the human brain could not form neurons after birth. Eventually, researchers found that neurogenesis did occur in childhood, but still thought that was the endpoint.Blood test holds promise for predicting when Alzheimer’s symptoms will start“That’s what they used to teach when I went to medical school,” Dupont says.In the past few decades, however, this dogma was challenged by new evidence supporting neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus2, fuelling an ongoing debate in neurobiology.