Your Aging Brain – Is Dementia in Your Future?
By Royane Real
Author of`: How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative
In the nursing home where my mother now lives, there are several elderly ladies who are suffering from various forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Some of these ladies seem to be declining mentally so quickly that I can see a noticeable difference from one week to the next.
Anyone who has spent time visiting elderly people in nursing homes is bound to be affected by the sight. It is heartbreaking to see so many people staring blankly, not really knowing who they are, or where they are. Some of them no longer recognize their family members.
When we are young, in our twenties and thirties, the sight of older people who have developed dementia is alarming to us. However, when we are young we feel that we are many, many decades away from having to worry about whether dementia will affect us. As we grow older and reach our fifties and our sixties, we start to notice some changes in the ways that our brains think and remember. We forget things more often, and we may feel like our brain is in a fog. Every time we forget some well known name, and every time we enter a room unable to remember why we went in there, we wonder if we are having a senior’s moment.
At first, we may laugh off our occasional mental mistakes, but in many cases these mental moments of forgetfulness become more and more frequent. At what point should we become alarmed that our minds no longer work the way they used to? How can we tell whether our moments of forgetfulness are something to laugh off, or something to worry about?
The truth is, our brain has been changing throughout our lifetime. In fact, it has been changing since before we were born. As we progress in our lives, through various stages of development, our brain interacts with our environment. With our brain, we learn a huge number of facts, we think many thoughts, we create with our minds, and we draw conclusions, we remember the past and we plan for the future.
Our brain is changing at every step of this journey. We create new links even as our brain loses old links. It is normal for the human brain to start losing some processing speed as we enter our fifties and sixties.
The good news is that most people will manage to reach their later years with healthy brains. That means these people can continue to use their brains to grasp the valuable lessons of a life well lived. They will still be able to think, learn, create, and make new plans. Others will start to lose the ability to remember and plan. They may eventually lose the ability to look after themselves.
What is it that separates the people who manage to get to their later years with their brains healthy, and those whose minds start to weaken because of some brain disease such as Alzheimer’s? What can be done to help more people achieve a healthy brain as they grow older?
This indeed is the billion dollar question. As so much of our current population ages, we may be faced with a tidal wave of many elderly people afflicted with some serious form of dementia. This will result in a huge medical cost to society, along with anguish for the families of those afflicted, and the unspeakable tragedy of those people who completely lose their sense of identity.
All over the world, researchers are trying to understand what happens to set off the chain of events that ends in the loss of brain function caused by the various forms of dementia. More importantly, researchers are looking for ways to stop this process so that many more people can survive into old age with their memories and their identities intact.
This article was written by Royane Real, author of “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative” Learn more ways to look after your brain in my popular book. Download it today or get the paperback version at http://www.lulu.com/real
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