Nearly a quarter of the changes seen in a person’s intelligence level over the course of a lifetime may be the result of genetic factors, an innovative genetic analysis has shown.
The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that genes may partly explain why some people’s brains age better than others, even though environmental factors are likely to play a greater role over a person’s lifetime.
The quest to understand the factors behind healthy mental aging has become an increasingly vital one for societies with large elderly populations. However, it isn’t an easy task. Traditional methods of estimating the influence of genes have been limited by comparisons between related groups, such as identical or fraternal twins, rather than people unrelated by birth.