Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 16, 1991                   TAG: 9102160015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

STUDY: MANY ELDERLY KEEP MENTAL YOUTH

The new studies do not dispute the longstanding belief that, for most people, mental ability declines with age. What they do show is that some men manage to escape that trend.

The studies also provide intriguing clues to how that happens, said Sandra Weintraub, aneuropsychologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"What distinguishes the top performers from the bottom performers in men over 65 is maintenance of high scores on memory and attention tests," she said Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Weintraub's findings were based on a computer test of 1,101 doctors 28-92 years old.

The test measures memory, attention, visual perception, calculation and reasoning, she said. She and her colleagues found that the top scorers aged 75-92 did as well as the average of men under 35.

In a separate study, Edwin Shneidman of the University of California Los Angeles tested 35 intellectually gifted men at age 70 and again at age 80.

He found that 77 percent of them increased the size of their working vocabularies during their 70s. Weintraub said her study showed that medical conditions such as high blood pressure, use of prescription drugs or others had no correlation to a subject's ability to do well on the test.

Top scorers were much more likely to have continued working than were bottom scorers, she said. Some researchers believe that working stimulates maintenance of mental function, but Weintraub disagrees.

"I don't think it's `use it or lose it,' " she said. She believes the decline in mental ability may come first, "and if you don't have it, you can't continue to work."

Weintraub speculated that the ability of some men to retain mental function might be related to their ability to produce a type of brain cell not present at birth.

These neurons, which are rich in an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase, increase with age in normal people and are sharply reduced in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, she said.

It is not likely that the loss of brain cells is responsible for the decline in some men's mental abilities, she said. Recent studies show that most death of brain cells occurs before age 18, she said.