Latest Research News

Following on from indications that gum disease might be a risk factor for dementia, analysis of data from 152 subjects in the Danish Glostrop Aging Study has revealed that periodontal inflammation at age 70 was strongly associated with lower cognitive scores (on the Digit Symbol Test). Those with periodontal inflammation were nine times more likely to test in the lower range compared to those with little or no periodontal inflammation. A larger follow-up study, among a more ethnically diverse range of subjects, is planned. I hope they also plan to extend the cognitive testing.

I have often spoken of the mantra: What’s good for your heart is good for your brain. The links between cardiovascular risk factors and cognitive decline gets more confirmation in this latest finding that people whose hearts pumped less blood had smaller brains than those whose hearts pumped more blood. The study involved 1,504 participants of the decades-long Framingham Offspring Cohort who did not have a history of stroke, transient ischemic attack or dementia. Participants were 34 to 84 years old.

A number of studies have found that source memory (knowing where you heard/read/experienced something) is a particular problem for older adults. Destination memory (knowing who you’ve told) is an area that has been much less studied. Last year I reported on why destination memory is difficult for all of us (my report is repeated below). A follow-up study has found not only that destination memory is a particular problem for older adults, but that it is in fact a worse problem than source memory.

Anticholinergics are widely used for a variety of common medical conditions including insomnia, allergies, or incontinence, and many are sold over the counter. Now a large six-year study of older African-Americans has found that taking one anticholinergic significantly increased an individual's risk of developing mild cognitive impairment and taking two of these drugs doubled this risk. The risk was greater for those who didn’t have the ‘Alzheimer’s gene’, APOE-e4.

Findings that children are less likely than adults to distort memories when negative emotions are evoked has significant implications for the criminal justice system. Experiments involving children aged seven and 11, and young adults (18-23) found that when they were shown lists of closely related emotional words (e.g. pain, cut, ouch, cry, injury), they would tend to mistakenly remember a related word (e.g. hurt) although it had not been present.

Another study has come out showing that older adults with low levels of vitamin D are more likely to have cognitive problems. The six-year study followed 858 adults who were age 65 or older at the beginning of the study. Those who were severely deficient in vitamin D were 60% more likely to have substantial cognitive decline, and 31% more likely to have specific declines in executive function, although there was no association with attention.

Previous research has shown that older adults are more likely to incorrectly repeat an action in situations where a prospective memory task has become habitual — for example, taking more medication because they’ve forgotten they’ve already taken it. A new study has found that doing something unusual at the same time helps seniors remember having done the task.

It’s now well established that older brains tend to find it harder to filter out irrelevant information. But now a new study suggests that that isn’t all bad. The study compared the performance of 24 younger adults (17-29) and 24 older adults (60-73) on two memory tasks separated by a 10-minute break. In the first task, they were shown pictures overlapped by irrelevant words, told to ignore the words and concentrate on the pictures only, and to respond every time the same picture appeared twice in a row.

More data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States has revealed that cognitive abilities reflect to a greater extent how old you feel, not how old you actually are. Of course that may be because cognitive ability contributes to a person’s wellness and energy. But it also may reflect benefits of trying to maintain a sense of youthfulness by keeping up with new trends and activities that feel invigorating.

A study involving 54 older adults (66-76) and 58 younger adults (18-35) challenges the idea that age itself causes people to become more risk-averse and to make poorer decisions. Analysis revealed that it is individual differences in processing speed and memory that affect decision quality, not age. The stereotype has arisen no doubt because more older people process slowly and have poorer memory.

A rhesus monkey study has revealed which dendritic spines are lost with age, providing a new target for therapies to help prevent age-association cognitive impairment. It appears that it is the thin, dynamic spines in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which are key to learning new things, establishing rules, and planning, that are lost. Learning of a new task was correlated with both synapse density and average spine size, but was most strongly predicted by the head volume of thin spines.

An imaging study reveals why older adults are better at remembering positive events. The study, involving young adults (ages 19-31) and older adults (ages 61-80) being shown a series of photographs with positive and negative themes, found that while there was no difference in brain activity patterns between the age groups for the negative photos, there were age differences for the positive photos.

Examination of the brains from 9 “super-aged” — people over 80 whose memory performance was at the level of 50-year-olds — has found that some of them had almost no tau tangles. The accumulation of tau tangles has been thought to be a natural part of the aging process; an excess of them is linked to Alzheimer’s disease. The next step is to work out why some people are immune to tangle formation, while others appear immune to the effects. Perhaps the first group is genetically protected, while the others are reaping the benefits of a preventive lifestyle.

An imaging study involving 79 volunteers aged 44 to 88 has found lower volumes of gray matter and faster rates of decline in the frontal and medial temporal

A new study provides more support for the idea that cognitive decline in older adults is a product of a growing inability to ignore distractions. Moreover, the study, involving 21 older adults (60-80) shown random sequences of pictures containing faces and scenes and asked to remember only the scene or the face, reveals that being given forewarning about which specific pictures would be relevant (say the second, or the fourth) did not help.

The role of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene in cognitive function has been the subject of some debate. The gene, which affects dopamine, comes in two flavors: Val and Met.

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