His team now has evidence that the brains of the Tsimane and neighboring Moseten people may age more slowly than the brains of almost everyone else in the industrialized world. Something about lifestyle affects the aging of the brain,” Kaplan says. He thinks he knows what it is and that it can teach him how to better control aging of the brain.
public health Remote societies may enlighten public health elsewhere. Back in the 1980s, Kaplan worked with the Masigenga, an indigenous group that had recently come into contact with Peru’s industrialized society. As Kaplan observed their lives and conducted interviews, people often asked him for help with health problems.
So he asked his colleague, Dr. Benson Deitz, to come in for a check-up. Deitz flew to Peru in 1987 to diagnose patients with infectious diseases. But he was surprised by what he didn’t find. He heard no murmurs or other heart problems. The Mashigenga had healthy hearts and blood pressure even in old age. Kaplan concluded that they may be spared many chronic diseases. That hunch stuck with him.
Thirty years later, Kaplan is still connecting the dots between lifestyle and chronic illness, providing health care in the villages that host his teams and work with them. meet medical needs. In return, researchers can learn about heart and brain diseases.
Over the years, Kaplan’s team has reported that, like the Masiguenga, the Tsimane have higher than average infection rates and lower rates of heart disease and diabetes than people in the United States and Europe. “These were not aging-related conditions,” says Daniel Eid Rodriguez, a biomedical researcher at San Simon Mayor University in Bolivia, who has worked with Kaplan and Tsimane since 2004. . Rodriguez. “The Tsimane lifestyle seemed like a healthy recipe.”
On the other hand, in the United States today, the majority of people die from diseases of aging. Heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease accounted for 56% of his deaths in the US in 2019. The problem is that industrialized society is an unnatural environment for humans, full of cheap calories and opportunities to be inactive.
Kaplan’s team wanted to see if non-industrial versus modern industrialized living benefits the brain as well. continued a successful partnership and started a new partnership with nearby Moseten. The Moseten are an indigenous group more involved in agriculture and modern markets than the Tsimane. Moseten rely less on hunting and foraging. That means you don’t have to work as much for food. All participants surveyed by the team were over the age of 40. This is because scientists expect the aging of the brain to become more pronounced.
