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It’s not just our body that breaks down with old age. Inevitably (cuối cùng, không thể tránh khỏi), the effects of aging hit the brain as well, affecting our cognitive abilities (khả năng nhận thức) to remember and pay attention to things. However, just like a good skin routine can minimize wrinkles (vết nhăn) on the face, there are methods to stave off cognitive decline from aging. Besides keeping the mind sharp with intellectual activities like playing chess or reading ZME Science, one particularly outlandish method could prove to be transplanting fecal matter from younger individuals. This is not satire (châm biếm).

In a recent study published in the journal Nature Aging, neuroscientists at University College Cork in Ireland transplanted the poop of 3 to 4-month-old mice into the intestines of 19- to 20-month-old mice. The age difference is equivalent to that between 18-year-old and 70-year-old humans.

After some time, the transplanted fecal bacteria colonized the guts of the elderly rodents (chuột), growing and expanding until the microflora of the young and old mice resembled each other.

To see how the gut microbes may have affected the brain, the researchers placed the mice in a water maze, which challenges them to plan an escape route. Older mice that received a fecal transplant found the escape platform quicker and with greater odds of success than old mice with the same old poop. They also remembered the escape route just as well as younger mice.

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