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Forgetting an Appointment or Name of Friend is Not Necessarily the Beginning of Dementia
Senior Journal
October 8, 2008
Maybe there are just too many things to remember for the size of your brain.
Most older people that occasionally struggle to remember the name of a friend or totally forget an appointment are quick to conclude this embarrassment is caused by aging - the early signs of dementia. They may be wrong, according to a study published yesterday in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, which finds this happens to people without dementia, too.
The study involved 500 people age 50 to 85 that had been tested and found to have no dementia. They all lived in the Netherlands.
Participants were asked about occasional memory problems such as having trouble thinking of the right word or forgetting things that happened in the last day or two, or thinking problems such as having trouble concentrating or thinking more slowly than they used to.
Their brains were scanned to measure the size of the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for memory and one of the first areas damaged by Alzheimer’s disease. (See more below news report)
Of the 500 people, 453 (90.1%) reported that they had occasional memory or thinking problems, which are also called subjective memory problems, because they would not show up on regular tests of memory and thinking skills.
The study found that in people with occasional subjective memory problems, the hippocampus was smaller than in people who had no memory problems.
On average, the hippocampus had a volume of 6.7 milliliters in those with occasional subjective memory problems, compared to 7.1 milliliters in people with no memory problems.
“These occasional, subjective memory complaints could be the earliest sign of problems with memory and thinking skills and we were able to discover that these subjective memory complaints were linked to smaller brain volumes,” said study author Frank-Erik de Leeuw, MD, neurologist and clinical epidemiologist, of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Netherlands.
“Because occasional memory lapses were so common, though, much more work needs to be done to use such complaints diagnostically “
All of the participants also had white matter lesions in their brains, or small areas of brain damage. The researchers measured the amount of white matter lesions, and found that the amount of lesions was not tied to occasional memory problems.
The participants had all visited a neurology outpatient clinic not because of memory complaints but for reasons such as falls, vertigo, chronic head pain, or mild traumatic brain injury.
“To further strengthen the possible connection between the subjective memory complaints, size of hippocampus and the development of Alzheimer’s disease in all of the participants will be investigated again within the coming years,” said de Leeuw.
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