The ‘Nun Study’ is a lon­gi­tu­di­nal study of age­ing and Alzheimer’s that uses data gath­ered from over 600 nuns over the past 20+ years. Some inter­est­ing cor­re­lates are start­ing to appear:

The nuns make for a very unique pop­u­la­tion to study […] because of their sim­i­lar lifestyles.

“They don’t smoke, they don’t drink, so you can reduce the effects of some of these other envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, and focus in on other fac­tors that might be harder to get your hands around in other pop­u­la­tion studies.” […]

Among the study’s find­ings are a rela­tion­ship between early child­hood edu­ca­tion and reduc­ing the sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to Alzheimer’s dis­ease, [and] a rela­tion­ship between trau­mas to the brain, such as strokes, and an increased sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to Alzheimer’s. […]

Another inter­est­ing find­ing has been that some of the nuns brains look like they have Alzheimer’s but the women weren’t exhibit­ing symp­toms before they died.

“If that’s the case, there may be things you can do, even though you have the dis­ease to slow down or pre­vent the expres­sion of the dis­ease symptoms”.

Read­ing this arti­cle, I’m not sure what I enjoyed the most: learn­ing about this fas­ci­nat­ing study, or the pic­ture of the neu­ropathol­o­gist stand­ing in front of over 600 plas­tic con­tain­ers each hold­ing a nun’s brain!

For more infor­ma­tion on this study, Time wrote a com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle back in 2001, and there’s a ded­i­cated sec­tion on the Uni­ver­sity of Minnesota’s site.

via @mocost