Surely you had heard that the brains of old people they no longer produced new cells. Well, recent discoveries contradict this theory that most believed true. A recent discovery states that: elderly brains DO produce new cells.
Older brains DO produce new cells
Last April 2018, the magazine Cell Stem Cell published a report that collected the last results of some research on the brain . It had always been believed that aging brains stopped producing new cells, but it has been proven that this is not the case, that they produce as many new cells as young brains.
The investigation was conducted by the Dr. Maura Boldrini , a neurobiologist from Columbia University and first tests were done in mice, to see later that in humans the result was the same. The elderly brains also produced new cells. Boldrini's team was able to study the production of cells in the brain during the time that an average human life would last. For this they had 28 brains of Healthy people between 14 and 79 years fruit of donations of deceased people. When they said "healthy" in relation to that body, they referred to the fact that they had not taken any type of drugs or antidepressant medications or had any disorder worthy of mention. In addition all of them were accompanied by a comprehensive medical history.
Dr. Boldrini's team used devices with sophisticated software to count the cells in a section of the hippocampus of each of the brains, since human organs are much more complicated than those of mice that can be counted more easily. Both in the brains of older people and in those of young people, there were new cells. The difference was in the production of new blood vessels that were lower in the old ones and in which the velocities were slower when establishing new connections between the brain cells.
In front of this study by Dr. Boldrini there is one published in Nature a month before he says otherwise. The doctor believes that this difference may be due to the fact that in the study published in Nature different types of brains , many of them "Not healthy" and that they had been preserved by different methods that could have destroyed the evidence of new cells. The brains investigated by Columbia University were healthy and this leads them to suppose that this production of new cells is a characteristic of the brains that follow healthy until you reach old age .
If you were interested in this article, you may want to know if you can modify the brain by reading the post: Can cognitive training change our brain?