Nonagenarian athlete: Researchers study Olga Kotelko's
brain
Date:
August 17, 2015
Source:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Summary:
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. The resulting study
offers a surprising first glimpse of the potential effects of exercise on the
brains and cognitive abilities of the 'oldest old.'
FULL STORY
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
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, visited the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the
University of Illinois and submitted to an in-depth analysis of her brain.
The resulting study, reported in the journal Neurocase,
offers a surprising first glimpse of the potential effects of exercise on the
brains and cognitive abilities of the "oldest old."
A retired teacher and mother of two, Kotelko started
her athletic career late in life. She began with slow-pitch softball at age 65,
and at 77 switched to track-and-field events, later enlisting the help of a
coach. 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 our studies, we often collect data from
adults who are between 60 and 80 years old, and we have trouble finding
participants who are 75 to 80 and relatively healthy," said U. of I.
postdoctoral researcher Agnieszka Burzynska, who led the new analysis. As a
result, very few studies have focused on the "oldest old," she said.
"Although it is tough to generalize from a single
study participant to other individuals, we felt very fortunate to have an
opportunity to study the brain and cognition of such an exceptional
individual," said Beckman Institute director Art Kramer, an author of the
new study.
In one long day at the lab, Kotelko submitted to an
MRI brain scan, a cardiorespiratory fitness test on a treadmill and cognitive
tests. (All of the data are available at XNAT, a public repository; Kotelko and
her daughter agreed to make her data public.)
"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.
The researchers wanted to determine whether Kotelko's
late-life athleticism had slowed -- or perhaps even reversed -- some of the
processes of aging in her brain.
"In general, the brain shrinks with age,"
Burzynska said. Fluid-filled spaces appear between the brain and the skull, and
the ventricles enlarge, she said.
"The cortex, the outermost layer of cells where
all of our thinking takes place, that also gets thinner," she said. White
matter tracts, which carry nerve signals between brain regions, tend to lose
their structural and functional integrity over time. And the hippocampus, which
is important to memory, usually shrinks with age, Burzynska said.
Previous studies have shown that regular aerobic
exercise can enhance cognition and boost brain function in older adults, and
can even increase the volume of specific brain regions like the hippocampus,
Kramer said.
Kotelko's brain offered some intriguing first clues
about the potentially beneficial effects of her active lifestyle.
"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.
"Olga had quite a lot white-matter
hyperintensities, which are markers of unspecific white-matter damage,"
she said. These are common in people over age 65, and tend to increase with
age, she 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.
"She was quicker at responding to the cognitive
tasks than other adults in their 90s," Burzynska said. "And on
memory, she was much better than they were."
Her hippocampus was smaller than the younger
participants, but larger than expected given her age, Burzynska said.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment