The issue of the effect of menopause on women’s cognition, and whether hormone therapy helps older women fight cognitive decline and dementia, has been a murky one. Increasing evidence suggests that the timing and type of therapy is critical.

A new study adds more support to the idea that the increasing difficulty in learning new information and skills that most of us experience as we age is not down to any difficulty in acquiring new information, but rests on the interference from all the old information.

I’ve written before about the gathering evidence that sensory impairment, visual impairment and hearing loss in particular, is a risk factor for age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

Here’s an encouraging study for all those who think that, because of age or physical damage, they must resign themselves to whatever cognitive impairment or decline they have suffered.

Providing some support for the finding I recently reported — that problems with semantic knowledge in those with mild cognitive impairment (

Previous research has pointed to an association between not having teeth and a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia. One reason might have to do with inflammation — inflammation is a well-established risk factor, and at least one study has linked gum disease to a higher dementia risk.

Sad to say, another large study has given the thumbs down to ginkgo biloba preventing Alzheimer’s disease.

New research suggests that reliance on the standard test Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale—Cognitive Behavior Section (ADAS-Cog) to measure cognitive changes in Alzheimer’s patients is a bad idea. The test is the most widely used measure of cognitive performance in clinical trials.