HealthDay (2/23, Norton) reports a postmortem study “may have uncovered a key reason some people remain sharp as a tack into their 80s and 90s: Their brains resist the buildup of certain proteins that mark Alzheimer’s disease.” For the study, investigators “analyzed brain tissue from seven super agers – all women – who had died in their 80s or 90s,” then compared those “results…with brain studies from six elderly adults who’d had normal thinking skills before their deaths.” The study revealed that while “both super agers and their peers harbored similar amounts of amyloid plaque in the brain,” individuals “with average memory and thinking skills had three times the amount of tau tangles in a memory-related brain region called the entorhinal cortex.” The findings were published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex. (SOURCE: APA Headlines)