Brain cells could suggest just how old you are.
As we get older, our brain cells show changes, and now a new study finds that certain changes happen so reliably that by themselves they can reveal a person's age. In the study, researchers analyzed brain tissue samples from 480 people who died between the ages 16 and 106. None of these individuals had experienced a brain disease before their death. The researchers then examined whether they could find differences between the older brains and the younger ones by looking at the level of their expression of certain genes, meaning which genes were "turned on" and "turned off." They found that, with age, certain types of brain cells called glial cells showed a shift in their gene expression patterns in certain regions of the brain. In contrast, no such change was seen in the brain's neurons, which are the "signaling cells" of the brain. Glial cells provide support for neurons. What's more, when the researchers looked at whether the gene exp