This Doctor’s Brain Is 7 Years Younger Than She Is, And She Wants You to Have the Same
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Christin Glorioso has devoted her career to testing brain aging and slowing it down.
Ask Christin Glorioso how old she is, and she’ll reply that she’s “45… chronologically.”
“My brain is seven years younger,” says Glorioso, the MD-PhD, founder of NeuroAge Therapeutics. And she says that number matters. “About 45 percent of Alzheimer’s is preventable through measures we have today, even if you have genetic risk factors. So if you can be just five years younger in your biological brain aging [compared to your chronological age], you significantly reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.”
Glorioso is obsessed with getting these measures right through multiple tests, and it guides how NeuroAge works: Science has shown that the most accurate brain age estimates come from measuring lots of factors — brain imaging, blood tests, genetic factors, and cognitive performance through testing.
“I’m in the camp of ‘test everything,’” she says, “It’s better to know about a problem before it gets too bad.”
She’s adding more self-testing to her battery in November, when she’ll test not just her cognition, but her [vee-oh-too maks]nounA measurement of how much oxygen your body can use during exercise.Learn More: VO2 Max, balance, agility, and more as a Founding Athlete at the Super Age Games.
From a Family History to a Forward-Looking Practice
Glorioso’s career path was set by personal tragedy: When the future brain researcher was just a child, her grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease at a relatively young age.
“It was about seven years long, her course of illness. My grandfather took care of her the whole time, and it was very hard for him,” she says. “Oftentimes it’s even harder for the caregivers than for the person themselves, because you just lose someone so slowly.”
Inspired to save others from feeling the same pain, Glorioso began studying how brains age during her combination MD/PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, then continued her studies at MIT. Her research included groundbreaking work not just on the fact that our brains do age, but how, starting at the molecular level.
What she’s learned is that in some regards, all our brains age in the same way, even if it’s not at the same speed.
“All neurodegenerative disorders are loss of neurons… cell death is the real problem,” she says, noting that this results in less brain mass. “Your [mahy-tuh-kon-dree-uh]nounOrganelles in cells responsible for producing energy (ATP), often called the powerhouse of the cell.Learn More: Mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of your cells, start to fail. You get an increase in damage in your DNA which doesn’t get repaired properly. Your neurons, if you think of them like trees, become scragglier — they’re trees with less foliage and less connections.”
That’s what we all have in common. But she’s also learned the ways this process can be individualized: The de-leafing of those brain trees happens in different areas for different people. And knowing where neurons are dying matters for how NeuroAge patients can prevent decline.
“If they die in the hippocampus, that’s Alzheimer’s. If they die in a [doh-puh-meen]nounA neurotransmitter linked to motivation, pleasure, and learning.Learn More: Dopamine region called the substantia nigra, that causes Parkinson’s. If they die in the frontal and temporal regions, that causes frontotemporal dementia,” she explains. Knowing where the aging is happening can help tailor therapies to improve those sections of the brain. With frontotemporal dementia, for example, interventions that help with Alzheimer’s won’t work, but music therapy can.
Glorioso’s personal brain risks are for Alzheimer’s, and over the past few years, she’s used lifestyle changes to target that risk and lower her overall brain age: Each day, she spends an hour with a friend or family member to build her relationships and community. She drinks four cups of green tea, which has been shown to reduce brain mass loss. She’s embraced a Mediterranean diet, which is associated with a wide variety of positive brain and all-body health outcomes.
She’s also training her brain with exercise — six days per week, 60-90 minutes per day. Glorioso does hot yoga several times per week to pack the benefits of sauna into her workouts. She resistance trains outside the studio several times per week. And she runs on the beach, with the recent addition of a weighted vest, to improve her cardiovascular health and endurance under load, one of the key biomarkers of aging.
“I’d really like age 100 to be like age 70,” she says of her targets for [lon-jev-i-tee]nounLiving a long life; influenced by genetics, environment, and lifestyle.Learn More: Longevity. “So just delaying all the age-related diseases and still being very functional. Making sure I’m doing all the balance exercises and getting enough sleep in order to be functioning really well later in life. And of course I’m doing all the diagnostics.”
The Super Age Games: A New Kind of Test
Those diagnostics will now include a new battery of tests: The eight-pack of longevity trials she’ll tackle at the Super Age Games.
Naturally, Glorioso and her young brain feel prepared for the cognitive testing. And with her thrice-weekly yoga sessions, the brain scientist figures she’ll be strong on balance, too. Her overall strength could be tested by the sandbag carry of the Super Age 800, though.
“I feel like I’d be able to run if the sandbag were a backpack,” she says, “but I don’t know how strong my arms are to hold a sandbag for a half-mile.”
To help prepare for the tests, she’s added a pull-up bar to her home to work on [grip strength]nounA key marker of strength and predictor of longevity.Learn More: Grip Strength, and said she “just crawled over a net for the first time since elementary school.” But she’s excited to see how she fares on these new diagnostics, and hopes the Games inspires others to test themselves and embrace healthy longevity, too.
“Right now, [longevity] has this reputation of being for billionaires,’” she says. “I’m really interested in making it accessible to everyone, and to explain how it fits into everyday life. It’s really about focusing on how people feel, and how they function.”
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