According to a large recent study, people with familial longevity have resilience to cognitive aging. In other words, you’ll keep your ability to think clearly, focus, learn and remember longer than your peers from families where parents lived less long.

The study investigated the rates of cognitive change across relatives and their spouses from 2 generations in the period of 15 years. The researchers found that people from long-lived families performed better than their spouses on 2 tests: a symbol coding test and a paragraph recall test.

A symbol coding test gives an insight into (psychomotor) processing speed, attention and working memory. On the other hand, a paragraph recall test provides with information on episodic memory.

The researchers highlight that their findings are based on people with normal cognitive aging, without any neurodegenerative diseases. They believe that studying in detail people with familial longevity can give us an insight in the genetics, environmental factors, and lifestyle habits that are vital in optimizing our brain health till the (very) old years of our life.

Curious? HERE is the source