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Cognitive decline is not inevitable with age.

"Super-agers" show resistance and resilience to age-related dementia.

You can make lifestyle changes to adopt some common practices of super-agers.

Many people assume that memory systems will fail as we age and that memory loss in the elderly is inevitable. However, the research shows that this is not actually the case. In fact, only approximately 11 percent of individuals 65 years of age or older have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), the most commonly diagnosed form of dementia (Alzheimer’s Association Report, 2025).

The research also shows that some elderly individuals do not seem to lose their cognitive faculties at all, actually performing as well on tests of memory as do people 30 years younger. These individuals are known as “super-agers,” and they have been a focus of study for quite a while.

The term “super-ager” was first coined by neurologist Dr. M. Marsel Mesulam in the late 1990s. Mesulam defined super-agers as “individuals over age 80 with episodic memory performance at least as good as normative values for 50- to 65-year-olds” (Harrison, Weintraub, Mesulam, and Rogalski, 2012).

Episodic memory is memory for our own personal history, as well as the context, the who, what, where, when, and why, associated with that particular event. We use episodic memory not just to recall the past, but also to support our daily lives. Have you ever stood by the door trying to remember where you put your keys? Coming up with the location of that lost object is an episodic memory. Episodic memory is also the first type of memory to show decline in AD, even before other symptoms are noticeable (Gallagher and Koh, 2011; Ghetti and Bunge, 2012).

By definition, super-agers have extraordinarily good episodic........

© Psychology Today