Athletes and age of peak performance | Axon Sports

Betty Davis once said "Old age is no place for sissies". Judging from the results of the studies cited in the Axon Sports article, it's no place for athlete's either. But the good news is that research appears to be leading to a better understanding of how the brain ages, which leads to advancement in treatments and cures for degenerative diseases like Alzheimers, as shown in the follow-up article on Galantamine.

As the safety advances that are developed on NASCAR tracks eventually flow through to the auto industry and provide benefits for the masses, some of the research built around the "laboratory of athletics" will lead to health benefits that will effect BOTH former athletes and non-athletes.

from Axonpotential.com:
Athletes and age of peak performance | Axon Sports:

July 27, 2011

Athletes and age of peak performance

Via Joaquin Chapa

The consistency of this rise-peak-decline pattern is striking, even across very different sports. For nearly every major sport, the age of peak performance is in the range of 22-30, and some interesting trends emerge when you look at sport type in relation to an athlete’s peak age. The age at which performance tends to peak across sports seems to mirror the continuum from purely explosive, athletic sports to slower, more skill-based sports, with explosive sports peaking earlier. Further, even within sports that combine different abilities, explosive abilities (e.g. base stealing in baseball) tend to peak earlier than more cognitive, skill-based abilities (e.g. drawing walks in baseball).

* For baseball, a number of studies, using different methods, have pegged peak age between 27-29. (Link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640410802691348#preview
* For Tennis, peak age has been pegged between the early 20′s and 25. (Link)
* For basketball, peak age has been found to be at 27 for all positions, with different positions showing different patterns of decline. (Link)
* For Track and Field, peak sprinting age has been found to be in the lower-mid twenties, with endurance events having older peak ages. (Link)
* For golf, athletes have broader peaks–between 25-35, with slower declines. (Link)
* For football, running backs and receivers peak around 27, with running backs showing sharper fall-offs than receivers. Quarterbacks have a broader peak between 25-35. (Link)

So why do athletes decline? One place where we might look for an explanation is in myelin integrity. Myelin is a fatty sheath that insulates the axon of the neuron, the long portion of the neuron that conducts the electrical signal when a neuron “fires”. This sheath acts like an electrical insulator, and allows the axon to conduct a signal much faster than an unmyelinated axon. Myelin is what gets called “white matter” when we’re talking about the brain (as opposed to “gray matter”, which is mostly composed of neuronal cell bodies). Neuroplastic changes in white matter have been observed in musicians and other categories of experts–it’s as if repetition and practice cause the laying down of additional layers of this myelinated insulation–so it isn’t too great of a leap to anticipate that highly trained athletes might exhibit differences in myelination and white matter when compared to the general population.

'via Blog this'

Galantamine May Improve Myelin Integrity
http://www.life-enhancement.com/magazine/article/1947-galantamine-may-improve-myelin-integrity

We’ll get to that matter of broken insulation. First, however, let’s consider a provocative idea put forth recently by Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, who stepped outside the box to have a fresh look at something important to all of us: our brain function and how it deteriorates with age.¹ The box in question encompasses our thinking about the use of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, the greatest scourge of them all.

Bartzokis believes that the indisputable benefits of AChEIs may be due in large measure to something other than what we’ve thought all along. To put his view into perspective, let’s have a quick look inside the box he broke out of. It’s not that there’s anything wrong in there—there certainly isn’t, as he’s quick to point out—but rather that the box is too small to encompass the larger picture he sees.

Galantamine—Potent and Versatile

It has long been known that AChEIs, such as the plant alkaloid galantamine, are effective in alleviating the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and slowing its inevitable course, usually for a period of about 6 months to a year, before the decline resumes in earnest. (There is still no cure for AD, which is ultimately fatal.) Some AChEIs, such as donepezil and rivastigmine, are prescription drugs. Galantamine too is sold by prescription, but, unlike the others, it’s also available as a nutritional supplement, owing to its use as such for many years before the FDA approved it as a “drug” in 2001.

 The Myelin Model of the Human Brain

In his paper, Bartzokis outlines what he calls the myelin model of the human brain, which he has been developing over the last several years (in numerous published papers). It involves the fact that the myelination of axons in the human brain is not fully developed at birth, but develops gradually throughout the first four decades of life, peaking at around age 45; thereafter, the brain’s myelin content declines gradually for the rest of our lives, as the myelin sheaths degrade. From the myelin perspective, these two broad phases in the life of the brain—a development phase (myelination) and a degeneration phase (demyelination) represent a curved trajectory, as seen below