The SuperAging Research Initiative: A multisite consortium focused on identifying factors promoting extraordinary cognitive aging

The designation of SuperAger is reserved for individuals age 80+ who have episodic memory capacity that would be considered at least average for those 2‐3 decades younger. The presence of such outliers raises questions of fundamental importance to the neurobiology of brain aging. Have these superior memory performers resisted age‐related changes, or have they simply started from a much higher baseline? Do they have identifiable peculiarities of genetic background? Is there something special about their brain structure or perhaps their resistance to age‐related processes such as neurofibrillary degeneration and amyloid deposition? These are the questions that were initially addressed by the Northwestern SuperAging Project, which identified unique results encompassing cognitive, psychosocial, molecular, and neuropathologic markers that characterize SuperAgers. Obstacles to further progress have been the relative rarity of this phenotype and, consequently, the barriers to racial diversity in the cohort.