Throughout life, cells of the body acquire somatic mutations. In frozen post-mortem human brains, researchers from Yale University have found that somatic, or non-inherited, mutations are considerably more likely to accumulate in roughly 6% of brains, and these “hypermutable” brains are typically 40 years of age or older.
The behavior, comparable to clonal hematopoiesis in the bone marrow that can result in blood cancer in elderly people, is attributed to cell lines with mutations that outcompete other cell lines.
This is the first large-scale study of somatic mutations in human brains. Scientists were not expecting to find this hypermutability in older populations.
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