Methodology of the Yale Study

The study, called “A Culture–Brain Link: Negative Age Stereotypes Predict Alzheimer’s Disease Biomarkers,” was published on December 7 in the journal Psychology and Aging.

Lead researcher Becca Levy summarized the findings: “We believe it is the stress generated by the negative beliefs about aging that individuals sometimes internalize from society that can result in pathological brain changes.”

Levy’s team came to the conclusions after studying 158 older people over a period of 10 years. The individuals were routinely interviewed about their attitudes toward aging by being asked how much they agreed with such statements as “old people are absent-minded.” The researchers also scanned their brains each year, paying particular attention to changes in the size of the hippocampus, which is known to shrink in individuals with Alzheimer’s.

“Those holding more-negative age stereotypes earlier in life had significantly steeper hippocampal-volume loss,” the researchers found.

Levy’s team also studied the brains of 78 individuals who died during the course of the study. Again they found that in those people who had held more negative beliefs about aging, there were significantly more physical signs linked to Alzheimer’s. The brains of the people whose interview results showed the most negative views of aging had far greater amounts of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles—two of the strongest indications of Alzheimer’s disease.