By Sarah C. P. Williams / The University of Chicago Magazine
Emily Rogalski had spent years studying superagers—people in their 80s and beyond whose memory rivals that of someone decades younger. But even she hesitated when a woman approached her after a presentation and introduced her 101-year-old mother with the proud declaration: “She’s still driving.”
Should someone over a century old really be behind the wheel? Rogalski wondered.
Then she met the woman: sharp, witty, a twinkle in her eye. “I would’ve gotten in the car with her,” Rogalski admits now. That moment reinforced everything her research suggested: Sometimes, aging can completely defy the odds.
“When we think about aging, we tend to focus on the negatives. We are very quick to dismiss older adults and not find value and look at them as an economic burden,” Rogalski says. But “there is a huge amount we can learn from these people, including the idea that not everything with aging is all doom and gloom.”
In her lab at the University of Chicago’s newly launched Healthy Aging & Alzheimer’s Research Care (HAARC) Center, Rogalski studies people at two extremes of aging: superagers, who seem to be resistant to cognitive decline, and people with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a neurodegenerative syndrome that makes them lose their ability to speak in middle age. Both groups are rare—PPA affects about 3 in 100,000 people, and only a small percentage of elderly adults meet the criteria to be dubbed superagers. But these outliers hold valuable lessons. Understanding what makes superagers resilient, Rogalski says, may help us understand why others are so vulnerable to cognitive decline.
Rogalski, the Rosalind Franklin PhD Professor of Neurology, never planned to study aging. But she has always been an advocate for overlooked perspectives.