Neuroscientists found a protein that appears to keep certain brains from aging , and it explains why some 80 - year - olds think like theyre 50

dmnews.com · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Add DMNews to your Google News feed. Tension: Two siblings share nearly identical genetics and lifestyles, yet one develops Alzheimer’s while the other tests cognitively decades younger than her age. The difference may come down to a single protein most people have never heard of. Noise: The wellness industry frames cognitive longevity as something you earn through discipline — the right diet, the right supplements, the right habits. Klotho research complicates that narrative by revealing a biochemical variable that operates independently of lifestyle choices. Direct Message: Brain aging isn’t a single inevitable trajectory. It’s a landscape of possible trajectories shaped by a protein we’re just beginning to understand — and for the first time, we may be close to not just measuring the difference, but rewriting it. To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology. Dolores Ramirez, 83, lives alone in a second-floor walkup in Queens. She does the New York Times crossword every morning in pen, volunteers at her local library three afternoons a week, and last Thanksgiving she corrected her grandson’s calculus homework. Her doctor told her family something unusual two years ago: Dolores’s cognitive test scores were comparable to those of a healthy 52-year-old. Her grandson, a junior at Columbia, joked that she was sharper than half his study group. Nobody in the family was laughing, though. They were genuinely confused. Dolores’s older sister, Mariana, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 74. Same parents. Same neighborhood. Same decades of rice and beans. How does one brain hold the line while another, sharing nearly identical genetics, collapses? That question used to live in the soft realm of mystery: luck, perhaps, or some unknowable combination of lifestyle and fortune. But a growing body of neuroscience research is pulling the answer into focus, and it centers on a single protein that most people have never heard of. The protein is called klotho. Named after the Greek fate who spins the thread of life, klotho was first identified in 1997 by researchers studying mice with accelerated aging. Mice engineered to lack the protein aged rapidly and died young. Mice engineered to overproduce it lived significantly longer. For years, klotho was studied primarily in the context of kidney function and cardiovascular health. Then, around 2015, neuroscientists began to notice something remarkable: people with naturally higher levels of circulating klotho performed better on cognitive tests, regardless of age. A landmark study published in Cell Reports by researchers at UC San Francisco found that a single genetic variant associated with elevated klotho levels conferred better cognitive function across the lifespan, even in people carrying the APOE4 allele, the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. That finding was, by neuroscience standards, jaw-dropping. APOE4 carriers are supposed to be the most vulnerable. Klotho appeared to act as a kind of molecular shield. Photo by Amel Uzunovic on Pexels The concept of “super agers” has been floating around cognitive science for over a decade. These are people in their 80s and 90s whose memory and executive function look decades younger than their chronological age. Northwestern University’s SuperAging Research Program, one of the most rigorous longitudinal studies of its kind, has been scanning and testing these individuals since 2007. What they keep finding is that super agers’ brains resist the cortical thinning that normally accompanies aging. Their anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in attention and emotional regulation, is thicker than average, sometimes thicker than people 30 years younger. As we explored in a piece on how super agers produce new brain cells well into their 80s, the habits these people share tend to be strikingly mundane. But habits alone don’t explain everything. Klotho may be the missing biological variable. Consider Gerald Osei, 79, a retired electrical engineer in Atlanta. Gerald runs four miles three times a week, eats a mostly Mediterranean diet, and has played competitive chess since he was 14. His cognitive scores are excellent. Then consider Nadine Falk, 81, a former high school principal in Milwaukee. Nadine has never been a runner. She describes her diet as “whatever’s easy.” She doesn’t play chess or do puzzles. Yet her cognitive testing, performed as part of a research cohort at the Medical College of Wisconsin, puts her in the same bracket as Gerald. When researchers measured their klotho levels, both were in the highest quintile for their age group. This is the part that unsettles the wellness industry. We have been told, for years, that cognitive longevity is something you earn through discipline: the right supplements, the right diet, the right brain-training app. And lifestyle absolutely matters. Research on the DASH diet and cognitive decline has shown meaningful protective effects. Physical exercise remains one of the most evidence-backed interventions we have. But klotho research introduces an uncomfortable variable: some brains may be biochemically primed to resist aging in ways that no amount of blueberries or Sudoku can replicate. Dr. Dena Dubal, the neuroscientist at UCSF who has led much of the klotho research, describes the protein’s effects as operating on multiple fronts simultaneously. Klotho appears to enhance synaptic plasticity, the brain’s ability to strengthen and reorganize neural connections. It reduces neuroinflammation, one of the key drivers of age-related cognitive decline. And it seems to interact with the NMDA receptor, a critical player in learning and memory, in ways that boost resilience without overstimulating the system. A 2023 study in Cell Reports demonstrated that injecting a fragment of the klotho protein into aged mice improved their cognitive performance within days, an effect that lasted for weeks. Photo by Steve Johnson on Pexels Days. Not months of supplementation. Not years of lifestyle modification. Days. The therapeutic implications are staggering, and as a recent piece on klotho’s potential to reshape cognitive decline treatment discussed, multiple biotech firms are now in early-stage development of klotho-based therapies. But we’re not there yet. No klotho supplement exists. No injection is available to the public. And the relationship between genetics, lifestyle, and klotho levels is far more tangled than any headline can capture. What’s known: klotho levels decline naturally with age, starting around 40. Chronic stress, poor sleep, and systemic inflammation appear to accelerate that decline. Exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, appears to boost klotho levels modestly. Certain dietary patterns may help sustain it. There’s even preliminary evidence, as explored in research on octogenarians who still produce new neurons, that social engagement and purposeful activity influence the broader neurobiological environment in which klotho operates. Meanwhile, neurologists have raised alarms about popular supplement stacks that may actually worsen the inflammatory conditions klotho helps buffer against. So what do you do with this information if you’re not Dolores Ramirez, blessed with sky-high klotho and a brain that hums along like it’s 1990? Here’s where it gets personal. I spoke with Reggie Kim, a 58-year-old Korean American physical therapist in Portland, Oregon, who told me he’d been obsessing over his cognitive future since his father was diagnosed with vascular dementia at 71. Reggie has reorganized his entire life around brain health: cold plunges at 5 AM, a strict anti-inflammatory diet, a meditation practice, Lion’s Mane extract, phosphatidylserine, the works. When I mentioned klotho to him, there was a long silence on the phone. “So you’re telling me some people just have this thing and their brain doesn’t age?” he said. “And I’m over here freezing in my backyard every morning?” I understood his frustration. But what the klotho research actually reveals, when you sit with it long enough, is something more nuanced than genetic fatalism. The protein isn’t a binary switch. It exists on a spectrum. And while some people carry genetic variants that give them a natural advantage, the environmental factors that influence klotho expression are real and modifiable. The cold plunges probably aren’t the critical variable. But the sleep, the movement, the inflammation management, the sense of purpose that keeps Reggie engaged with his own life: those things feed the system that klotho protects. The real shift klotho research demands is in how we think about cognitive aging itself. We’ve been treating it as an inevitability to be slowed, a long defeat to be managed with grace. The existence of super agers, and the molecular machinery that sustains them, suggests something different. Brain aging is not a single trajectory. It’s a landscape of possible trajectories, shaped by proteins we’re only beginning to understand, environmental inputs we can partly control, and genetic cards we were dealt before we took our first breath. Dolores Ramirez doesn’t know what klotho is. She’s never heard the word. When I asked her what she thinks keeps her sharp, she said, “I never stopped being curious about things.” That’s not a scientific answer. But klotho, at the molecular level, is essentially the brain’s way of staying curious: maintaining the plasticity to form new connections, reducing the inflammation that shuts down exploration, keeping the synaptic machinery loose and responsive. Curiosity as biology. Biology as curiosity. 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