Promoting functional brain maintenance – insights from successful agers

As we age, our bodies and brains decline. But in some individuals, even into the eighth and ninth decades, memory and cognitive flexibility remain sharp. A challenge is finding these individuals and harnessing the factors that have allowed them to age so successfully, and also to disentangle differences in how life trajectories start from and how they change with advanced aging. Our project’s goal is to characterize brain structure and function in relation to maintained cognition and memory, explore biological and lifestyle factors that support maintenance, and develop novel approaches to characterize brain aging trajectories within individuals over short time periods. We aspire to provide a conceptual foundation and empirical strategies to explore factors that maintain and promote brain health.