A novel study found that the brain of human’s closest relative chimpanzee do not shrink with age. However, humans are more susceptible to age-related diseases in comparison to chimpanzees because humans live relatively longer. As humans age, the brain get lighter and by reaching eighty, the average human brain has lost fifteen percent of its original weight.
People who suffer age-related dementias like Alzheimer’s experience even more shrinkage. The decline in brain’s weight is linked to drop in the delicate finger-like structures of neurons and in the associations between them. Together with this slow turning down in its fabric, ability of the brain to process thoughts, memories and signal to the rest of the body appears to reduce.
It is already known that certain areas of the brain appear to fare worse such as the cerebral cortex that is occupied in higher order thinking expediencies more than shrinkage than the cerebellum that manages motor control. Despite, ageing is global process researchers do not fully understand why human brains experience this persistent loss of grey matter with age.
Captivatingly, chimpanzee’s brain does not seem to experience the same weight loss, lifting the question of whether it is an idiosyncratically human condition. While comparing MRIs from more than eighty healthy people aged between twenty-two and eighty-eight with those of an analogous numeral of captive-bred chimps, the experts founds that chimp’s brain does not shrink with age.
The experts suggest that human longer lifespan is probably an adaptation to having bigger brains. According lead researcher anthropologist Chet Sherwood from George Washington University in Washington DC, humans live longer to pay for their larger brained children. The study was reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper.
A human brain is three times the size of chimpanzee. The study gives very good evidence that the patterns of brain ageing in humans are quite different from other animals, explained neuroscientist Tom Preuss from Emory University in Atlanta, US. However, these differences do not make other animals as models for studying age-related diseases.
Dr Preuss added, instead, the differences could help to explain why humans suffer more from these diseases in comparison to other animals.