Scientists find ageing ‘GPS cells’ can cause the elderly to get lost

THE reason that elderly people sometimes get lost may have been explained by scientists.

Researchers have discovered that “GPS cells” in the brain, which keep track of direction of travel, deteriorate with age and start to act more erratically.

The brain has a group of special cells that act like a grid, firing to the left or right, front or back, depending on a person’s movement, and creating an internal map.

Scientists at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Disease (DZNE) believe the map essentially fades with age, but they think it may be possible to find drugs to boost the activity of these grid cells.

“When you move around an unfamiliar environment, it is perfectly normal to get lost, yet this tends to happen more often to older people,” said Matthias Stangl, a researcher at the DZNE. “We had the hypothesis that socalled grid cells might be implicated.”

The scientists asked 41 healthy young and older adults to perform navigation tasks while scanning their brains.

They found older people did less well and the scans showed their grid cells were less active than those of younger people.

The research was published in the journal Current Biology.