I’m teaching a class on brain fitness for the Lifelong Learning Institute at Nova Southeastern University, and once again I’m thinking a lot about what goes in to keeping your memory sharp as you get older.
The members of the class are interested in my presentation, and we’ve done several exercises to help them learn more about what they can do to maintain and improve their memory.
Nothing is more helpful than understanding how your memory works, and probably the most critical issue for older persons and their memory is attention. Although it’s obvious (once you think about it), if you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t remember it.
Even the most commons memory complaints I hear from patients are often related to memory. The number one complaint is “I went in to another room to get something and forgot why I was there.” Whenever I mention this, I see lots of nods of recognition in the audience.
For many people, this issue is caused by failing to maintain attention on a specific task. While you’re going to the other room, your mind moves on to another topic (maybe you notice something else you’ve been meaning to do). By the time you get to the other room, you’ve lost the task you were thinking about in the first place.
The solution is to maintain focus on what you want to do, at least until you’ve been able to encode the task in your memory. This means keeping the task in mind while you go to the other room or rehearsing it several times before you move to the new room.
When we’re younger, we can depend on some things in our memory working automatically. As we get older, things that used to work automatically may require a little extra attention. Often, it’s not your memory that isn’t working, it’s how you’re paying attention.
Clinicians and researchers working with older persons often are concerned that their patients will develop a syndrome called frailty. Frailty is usually defined by the occurrence of muscle weakness, slow walking speed, exhaustion, weight loss, and low levels of physical activity.
Frailty may make you think about someone who is quite old and infirm, but at least some people think of frailty as a physical equivalent to developing cognitive problems. Pre-frailty (having just a few of the characteristics of frailty) may be like mild cognitive impairment, a milder form of memory or other cognitive problems that may lead to dementia.
From this point of view, preventing frailty may be a route to preventing decline. Although frailty is defined by things like slow walking and muscle weakness, research shows that frailty is associated with memory problems and depression.
It might seem odd that muscle strength and walking speed go along with memory and depression. But besides the research that show they are related, there’s a good reason why they are linked. Frailty has been linked to higher levels of markers of inflammation such as the pro-inflammatory substances called cytokines. There are substances in your body that are increased when you are sick, but they also increase as you get older.
Evidence suggests that low grade but chronic inflammation may be a key factor in aging. Researchers are still studying the best ways to reduce the effects of inflammation, but it’s likely that exercise reduces levels of inflammatory substances. It is also possible (but not proven) that antioxidant supplements and some diets may help to reduce inflammation. These same things may help prevent frailty. Exercise may be an important defense against developing frailty as well as helping with cognitive decline.
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