A genetic variant that makes small tweaks in an important brain protein may cause aging to hit some people’s brains harder than others.
Pilots’ performance on a flight simulator test generally declines slightly with age. But a new study shows that pilots with a particular version of a gene called BDNF have a faster drop than others. Researchers also observed a decline in the size of an important learning and memory center in the brains of those with the variant, Ahmad Salehi of the Department of Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and Stanford University, and colleagues report online October 25 in Translational Psychiatry.
About 38 percent of pilots in the new study carried the variant in either one or both of their copies of the BDNF gene. Over the course of two years the flight simulator scores of all the pilots in the study declined a little with age. But scores of pilots carrying the variant dropped about three times faster than scores of pilots who have the normal version of the gene.