Published: January 6, 2012
According to a new study,mental decline sets in by the age of 45, much earlier than previously thought.
Experts said that efforts to prevent dementia should start in middle age, as the most comprehensive study to date found that people’s cognitive powers are already waning by their mid-40s. Previously scientists had believed that there was no significant degeneration before the age of 60.
Poor cognitive status is perhaps the single most disabling condition in old age. As life expectancy continues to increase, understanding cognitive aging will be one of the challenges of this century.
Memory, reason and comprehension tests conducted on 7,000 British civil servants over a decade found decaying cognitive abilities even among the youngest in the sample, who were 45 at the start of the research. People in their late 40s saw their scores in mental reasoning tests decline by an average of 3.6 per cent by the time they were retested ten years later, according to research from the Whitehall II study— a follow-on to the Whitehall study, which also looked at civil servants — published in the British Medical Journal.
Anne Corbett, Research Manager of the Alzheimer’s Society said: “This large, important study adds vital information to the debate over when cognitive decline begins. However, the study does not tell us whether any of these people went on to develop dementia, nor how feasible it would be for GPs to detect these early changes.
“More research is now needed to help us fully understand how measurable changes in the brain can help us improve diagnosis of dementia.” ~ The Times
Source: The Times Whitehall II Study
Published: December 27, 2011
Image: istockphoto
oth children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings.
But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.
In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy – meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren’t so different from younger adults.
“Many people think that it is just natural for older people’s brains to slow down as they age, but we’re finding that isn’t always true,” said Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the studies.
“At least in some situations, 70-year-olds may have response times similar to those of 25-year olds.”
Ratcliff and his colleagues have been studying cognitive processes and aging in their lab for about a decade. In a new study published online this month in the journal Child Development, they extended their work to children.
Ratcliff said their results in children are what most scientists would have expected: very young children have slower response times and poorer accuracy compared to adults, and these improve as the children mature.
But the more interesting finding is that older adults don’t necessarily have slower brain processing than younger people, said Gail McKoon, professor of psychology at Ohio State and co-author of the studies.
“Older people don’t want to make any errors at all, and that causes them to slow down. We found that it is difficult to get them out of the habit, but they can with practice,” McKoon said. [continue reading…]
Published: December 16, 2011
istockphoto
rescriptions for second-generation antidepressants in older adults are associated with a modest increased risk of motor vehicle crashes, when combined with other medications that can impair cognition, finds a collaborative study by the
Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Ontario Ministries of Health and Transportation, and
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, reported in the December
American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
Researchers reviewed databases for adults age 65 and older in Ontario, Canada, between January 1, 2000, and October 31, 2007. A total of 159,678 individuals had a crash during the study, of whom 7,393 (5 percent) received an antidepressant in the month prior to the crash, but antidepressants alone did not lead to a heightened risk of a motor vehicle crash. Rather, risk was associated with crashes in which the individual used another strong, centrally acting medication, such as a benzodiazepine or anticholinergic as well. Noted limitations to the study included a lack of information about the dose of the antidepressants and the possible effects of dementia. Much more research is needed on the effect of depression and antidepressants on driving, the researchers noted.
Source:Essentials of Geriatric Psychiatry, Second Edition
Published: December 6, 2011
Older women with weaker circadian rhythms, who are less physically active or are more active later in the day are more likely to develop dementia or mild cognitive impairment than women who have a more robust circadian rhythm or are more physically active earlier in the day. That’s the finding of a new study in the latest issue of the Annals of Neurology.
“We’ve known for some time that circadian rhythms, what people often refer to as the “body clock”, can have an impact on our brain and our ability to function normally,” says Greg Tranah, PhD., a scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute – part of the Sutter Health network – and the lead author of the study. “What our findings suggest is that future interventions such as increased physical activity or using light exposure interventions to influence circadian rhythms, could help influence cognitive outcomes in older women.”
The researchers collected data on activity and circadian rhythm from 1,282 healthy women, all over the age of 75, who were taking part in the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures. All the women underwent a series of neuropsychological tests to ensure they had no evidence of cognitive or brain problems. At the end of five years 15 percent of the women had developed dementia and 24 percent had some form of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Those women who had weaker circadian rhythm activity, lower levels of activity, or whose peak level of activity was later in the day, were at highest risk of developing dementia or MCI. [continue reading…]
