So-called “super agers” have a couple of genetic advantages that help them maintain their brain health into late old age, a new study says.

These folks are less likely to harbor the gene variant most associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, the APOE-ε4 gene, researchers reported Jan. 16 in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

They also are more likely to have a gene variant thought to protect against Alzheimer’s, called APOE-ε2

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“Super agers” are people whose brain power at 80 or older compares to that of people 20 to 30 years younger, researchers said.

"With interest in super agers growing, our findings notably encourage the view that the super-ager phenotype will prove useful in the continued search for mechanisms conferring resilience to Alzheimer’s disease," senior researcher Leslie Gaynor said in a news release. She’s an assistant professor of geriatric medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

For the study, researchers tracked data from more than 18,000 people participating in eight ongoing studies of aging.

Results showed that super agers were 68% less likely to have the destructive APOE-ε4 gene, compared to people with Alzheimer’s in the same age range.

They also were 19% less likely to have APOE-ε4 than cognitively normal participants in the same age group, researchers said.

Finally, super agers were 28% more likely to have the protective APOE-ε2 gene than peers in good brain health and more than twice as likely to have that variant than people with Alzheimer’s.

“This was our most striking finding — although all adults who reach the age of 80 without receiving a diagnosis of clinical dementia exhibit exceptional aging, our study suggests that the super-ager phenotype can be used to identify a particularly exceptional group of oldest-old adults with a reduced genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” Gaynor said.

“This is by far the largest study to date to identify differences in APOE-ε4 allele frequency based on super-ager status, and the first study to find a relationship between APOE-ε2 allele frequency and super-ager status,” she added.

“We would expect these findings to lend continued interest to questions of how these variants may influence development of clinical dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, as well as to the super-ager phenotype more generally,” Gaynor concluded.