“Somebody that comes to my office and says, ‘I’m worried about my memory,’ probably does not have Alzheimer’s,” says Dr. An important part of a dementia workup is lab testing to make sure the forgetfulness is not due to underlying medical conditions such as an infection, lung, liver or kidney failure, Vitamin B-12 deficiency, thyroid disease, diabetes or depression. There are screening tests that doctors use to measure the degree of cognitive decline and how much it impacts a patient’s life. “When you’re forgetting to take your medicines, to go to doctors’ appointments, to take care of yourself… when you’re forgetting the names of important people in your life … that’s when we define it as becoming an illness,” says Dr. The time to become concerned is when memory loss impairs your daily functioning and begins interfering with your life. People who have Alzheimer’s-there’s something going wrong-their nervous system is actually aging quicker, it’s the normal cognitive decline going at a much faster pace.” Kean, “but it appears that it is a more rapid decline of the normal aging of the brain. “We really don’t know what’s going on with Alzheimer’s,” says Dr. “The older you get, the more likely you’re going to have Alzheimer’s changes.” “At age 65 it’s something like 3%, by age 80, it’s 40%. Mullen, “depending upon how much of the bad stuff you got, but we all get some with time.”Īlthough there have been cases of people getting Alzheimer’s in their 30s and 40s, most Alzheimer’s disease doesn’t start until people are older. “It almost looks like Alzheimer’s dementia is sort of a spectrum from very good to very bad,” says Dr. The problems we get into with aging are remembering the names of things, the names of people or remembering where we learned something: Where do I know that person from? Why did I come into this room? These are kind of normal manifestations of the normal decline with aging.”Īutopsies conducted on the brains of elderly people considered to have very good memories show some evidence of the plaques and tangles noted in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, just not as many. There’s really very little decline in short-term memory and in semantic knowledge, like vocabulary, which actually improves as we get older. In fact, short-term memory, the one we’re particularly worried about with dementia, doesn’t go away. You can still do those things you learned to do as a kid. “If we look at the positive side,” he says, “procedural memory shows no real decline with age. Thomas Mullen of Mullen Elder Care works with nursing home patients in Dalton and Lafayette, Ga.
#Senior moment how to
And even though we may have physical limitations, normal aging does not diminish our memory of how to tie our shoes, brush our teeth or drive a car.įamily practitioner and preventive care specialist Dr. As we age, some things, like vocabulary, actually get better. That’s normal aging of the brain.”Įven if we can’t remember where we put our keys, the important thing is that we still know how to drive the car. But those are different from Alzheimer’s, because most of the time you’ll remember it later on. “We jokingly call it a senior moment,” he says, “where you can’t recall something right at that moment. Larry Kean, adult and geriatric psychiatrist at Erlanger North, all of us have a steady decline in our cognitive capacity beginning in our 50s, but it’s usually imperceptible and not a significant problem for most people. But it is a physical fact that as we age, our neural connections slow down and fewer nerve cells are created.Īccording to Dr. These factors can influence the quality of the information your brain receives and how well it is processed, stored, and retrieved. Experts say the reason we forget has a lot to do with the thing we want to remember-how important it is to us, and what our stress levels are at the time. What is “Normal” about Cognitive Decline? So what is “normal” forgetfulness and how can we tell if it’s something more than the normal aging process? Electronic beeps remind me to make a phone call, stop by the store, keep an appointment, or take dinner out of the oven.
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