Brains age, just like the rest of the body, even for those don't get neurological disease, according to an Institute of Medicine."Some of the changes that one observes doesn't mean that it's all over, gloom and doom," the committee’s vice chair, Kristine Yaffe, MD, told the Washington Post.​While aging does more damage to some than others, most people can take steps to improve their health, according to Yaffe, the Roy and Marie Scola Endowed Chair and professor of psychiatry, neurology, and epidemiology at UCSF and chief of geriatric psychiatry and director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.