Study of nuns sheds light on aging process

USA Today

Downstairs, Sister Genevieve Kunkel strides purposefully to the back of a chapel to deliver communion wafers to nuns seated in wheelchairs. She's 90, but everything about her suggests a woman decades younger.

About half a mile away, Sister Coralie Ullrich, 87, is busy at a computer, answering the phone and filing papers in the registrar's office at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, where she works every day. "I don't want to retire yet, until I have to," she says.

These women are part of an ongoing study of 678 Catholic nuns that is finding that old age "can be just as fulfilling a part of human development as adolescence," says epidemiologist David Snowdon, who began the Nun Study in 1986. "Aging itself is overrated."

Snowdon describes the study and its participants in a new book, "Aging With Grace: What the Nun Study Teaches Us About Leading Longer, Healthier, and More Meaningful Lives" (Bantam, $24.95). The work has yielded some startling, often encouraging discoveries, he says, not the least of which is that an educated mind, healthy habits and, maybe most important, a sense of joy in living can lead to a long, vibrant and productive life, and may even block the effects of Alzheimer's disease.

"Those who are hopeful, happy, optimistic in attitude live much longer," Snowdon says. "That happy state is probably also a healthy state."

The nuns involved in the study range in age from 75 to 106 and are members of the School Sisters of Notre Dame congregation. Snowdon began his research as a pilot program at a Mankato, Minn., convent, then branched out to the order's six other U.S. provinces.

Villa Assumpta, in Baltimore, is an assisted-living facility with two floors devoted to skilled nursing care for those, like Sister Maura, who need it. She suffers from osteoporosis and uses a walker to get around. But her mind is as sharp as ever, and she stays in touch with the world by reading voraciously and writing to former students, to whom she taught writing and poetry for half a century. "I tell you, I've had a marvelous life," she says.

Of more than 100 sisters here, most of them former teachers, 32 are in the study. They are given mental and physical tests each year and have granted scientists access to their personal and medical records, data that allows Snowdon and colleagues to look at factors in youth that might boost the odds for a long, vibrant old age. Because the sisters share similar lifestyles and can be followed for so many years, "it's as close as you can get to a laboratory-pure environment, a unique model of aging in a population," Snowdon says.

To help scientists gain insight into diseases of the brain, such as Alzheimer's, each of the women also has pledged to donate her brain for medical research after death. Since the study began, 335 brains have been donated. Of the first 241 examined, Snowdon writes, 118 patients had dementia. Of those, 43 percent had Alzheimer's disease, 34 percent had a mixture of Alzheimer's and stroke, and the rest had dementia from other causes.

Snowdon says they've found that the condition of the brain doesn't always predict mental function. He recalls a sister who "straightened me out about what's possible at extreme age. She was incredibly robust" and had no sign of dementia, but her brain turned out to be full of the tangles of beta-amyloid protein that signal Alzheimer's disease. Conversely, Snowdon and colleagues have found sisters who suffered severe dementia but had only slight evidence of brain damage.

By looking back at autobiographies written by the sisters before they took their vows, when most were in their early 20s, the researchers found that those who had a rich vocabulary and were able to express themselves eloquently early in life were most likely to continue through old age with their intelligence intact.

"You don't have to join a convent to learn from these sisters," Snowdon says. "People talk a lot about 'use it or lose it.' I think it's 'develop it and keep it.' You've got to develop your mind to its highest potential in young life, and as an adult you've got to keep that and train the mind to its highest function." His advice: "Buckle your seat belt, watch your blood pressure, eat a prudent diet and be good at what humans are good at — language and social intercourse."