Humanity's latest brain advances are most at risk from aging

Over the six million years since humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor, the human brain has rapidly accumulated tissue that helps with decision-making and self-control, but the same areas are also at greatest risk of deterioration during ageing, a study finds.¹ They compared chimpanzee brain images with human brain scans.

Previous studies have shown that the last areas of the human brain to mature, such as parts of the frontal lobe, are the first to show signs of ageing.²This is known as the “last in, first out” theory, and new research shows that some of the areas that are slowest to mature and most susceptible to the effects of aging are also the most recently evolved in humans.

The results support “the important hypothesis that cortical expansion comes at the cost of compensating for age-related decline,” says neuroscientist Roger Mars of the University of Oxford in the UK. Scientific advances August 28th.

Mind Map

The researchers created a data-driven map of humans and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytesTo take a closer look at the human brain, researchers used non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to analyze scans of 189 chimpanzees aged between 9 and 50 years old, and 480 humans aged between 20 and 74 years old.

Overall, the two brains were found to be largely symmetrical in both hemispheres, with many similar clusters of anatomical structures, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, an area involved in complex cognitive functions such as language, working memory, time perception and decision-making, says study co-author Felix Hofstetter, a big data neuroscientist at the Jülich Research Center in Bonn, Germany. He says damage in this area has been linked to Alzheimer's disease and some types of dementia.

The researchers then measured how much gray matter in the brains lost over time — a sign of aging — in the chimpanzees up to age 50 and in the humans up to the equivalent of age 58. Humans saw the greatest loss in the frontal cortex, including the prefrontal cortex, while chimpanzees saw the greatest loss in the striatum, a central structure involved in habit formation and reward behavior. Areas of the brain involved in visual processing and motor skills were less affected by aging in both species.

Rapid growth

Finally, the researchers assessed which areas of the human brain had expanded the most compared to chimpanzee brains, comparing brain scans of humans and chimpanzees of the same age and sex. The most rapid evolution occurred in the prefrontal cortex, an area that is one of the most vulnerable to the effects of aging. A structure called the insular cortex, hidden deep within the brain and involved in processing emotions and body signals, also showed rapid evolution and increased risk with aging.

“The newest and greatest evolutionary change is where aging is happening the most,” Hofstetter said.

The researchers studied chimpanzees and olive baboons (Papio Anubis) and rhesus macaques (MacawNow, the researchers found no such association between brain regions that underwent rapid evolutionary expansion and regions that underwent accelerated aging, suggesting that this feature may be unique to human brain evolution.

Maas says it will be interesting to look at age-related changes, not just decline in grey matter but also changes in the connections between brain regions and gene expression profiles.

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