Reconciling Lifespan and Healthspan
Emily Rogalski quoted in the University of Chicago Magazine article, “Aging against the odds. The brains of aging outliers hold lessons for neuroscientists”:
‘“We’ve gotten good, as a medical community, at extending lifespan, but our health span is not keeping up. … We’re still extending this period of unhealthiness at the end,” she says. Superagers “really represent that better balance between lifespan and healthspan. It would be great to have a future where more people achieve that.”’
Aging Outliers Offer Valuable Lessons
Emily Rogalski, a University of Chicago scientist, studies both superagers (whom she defines as people over age 80 with memory performance at least as good as an average 50- to 60-year-old), as well as individuals at the other end of the aging spectrum—those with PPA, a disease that renders people unable to speak beginning in middle age. She believes these two extreme, and extremely rare groups, offer lessons in both brain resiliency and brain vulnerability.