Healthy Discoveries: Memory problems not a normal sign of aging: study

Healthy discoveries

Mild memory problems in older people are often excused as "senior moments," but a new study has found the same changes in the brain that make severe dementia may also be accountable for them.

The findings contradict a long-held opinion that memory loss is a normal part of aging, the U.S. team said.

"We don't think that just because you are old, a problem in memory and thinking is normal and should be ignored. We think it's an real sign of sickness," said Robert Wilson, a researcher at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, whose study appears in the journal Neurology.


Alzheimer's, the most common form of dementia, is a fatal brain sickness in which people progressively lose their memory and their ability to reason and care for themselves.


Only an autopsy can confirm the brain changes used to diagnose Alzheimer's sickness. Short of that, most patients need to take a battery of memory tests administered by specialists.


Wilson's results are the latest from a long-running study of 350 Catholic nuns, priests and brothers who were given memory tests every year for up to 13 years.


When they died, their brains were examined. Pathologists looked specifically for tau, a poisonous protein that forms tangles in the brain associated with Alzheimer's sickness.


They also examined for proofs of strokes and for Lewy bodies (an abnormal protein in nerve cells that can cause a form of dementia called Lewy body sickness).


Patients who showed no sign of memory loss also had clean brains. In the patients with memory problems, they tended to develop progressively, but then accelerated in the last four to five years of thier life.


"What we're saying is the brain changes that are mainly responsible for Alzheimer's and other dementias also seem to be mainly responsible for very mild early changes in memory and thinking," Wilson said in a telephone interview.


Many experts believe that Alzheimer's starts nearly 10 years before the sickness is diagnosed. Wilson said that his findings lend more credence to that theory.


Wilson said that people could get tested if they are troubled about memory changes. But people will have to weigh that decision carefully because currently, there are no drugs that can alter the progression of Alzheimer's, which affects more than 26 million people in the world.


Researchers are working on new ways to diagnose dementia based on protein biomarkers in spinal fluids and blood, or new imaging agents, in the hopes of developing new drugs that can prevent the sickness from progressing

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