Having a Senior Moment? It’s OK!
Forget where you put your glasses, only to find them on the chain around your neck? Have you ever gone through a series of three or four names before you finally got your child’s name correct? Don’t worry, say Harvard scientists. Such “senior moments†may be a normal part of the aging process for otherwise healthy people. The study, published in the December 2007 edition of the journal Neuron, compared brain scans of 38 adults under the age of 60 with scans of 55 adults over the age of 60. None of the study participants had disease-related memory declines such as Alzheimer’s. Researchers found that white matter tracks, which carry information between different regions of the brain, were deteriorating only in the “older†group. This suggests that cognitive decline may be linked to communication problems between regions of the brain caused by the normal aging process. Source: NeuronVolume 56, Number 5, Pages 924-935“Disruption of Large-Scale Brain Systems in Advanced Agingâ€Authors: Andrews-Hanna JR,
Snyder AZ, Vincent JL, Lustig C, Head D, Raichle ME, Buckner RL.