Monday, January 8, 2018

Awareness of memory problems may lessen 2 to 3 years before onset of memory loss or dementia

memory problems

Researchers have found that people who develop dementia may start to lose awareness of their memory problems 2 to 3 years before memory loss or dementia starts.

Dementia is a general term for a decline in memory loss and cognitive skills with enough severity to interfere with daily life. The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. An estimated 5.3 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s. It is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. According to Alzheimer’s Society UK, the number of Alzheimer’s patients in UK will reach 850,000 by the end of this year.  

The study done by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago was published in the journal Neurology.

The researchers also found that many memory loss or brain changes related to dementia, or pathologies are to be blamed for the deterioration in memory awareness.

Robert S. Wilson, PhD, of Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, says that their findings suggest not being aware about one’s memory problems is an unavoidable characteristic of late-life dementia that is initiated by an accumulation of changes in the brain that are related to dementia.

Dr. Wilson, who is also a study author added that not being aware of memory loss is usual in dementia, but they never knew much about its commonness, when it develops and why some individual appear more affected than others.

memory problems


Participants in the memory loss or dementia study were 2,092 adults with an average age of 76 years, who had no signs of memory loss or cognitive impairment. Researchers monitored the participants for more than 10 years. They had to take yearly tests on memory and cognitive skills. They were asked how often they found it difficult to remember things and were also told to assess their memory compared to ten years prior.

During the course of the study, 239 participants were diagnosed with dementia. In these seniors, awareness of memory problems began to drop abruptly on an average of 30 months before dementia first appeared. While results were same for all the participants, researchers were surprised to find that memory loss occurred earlier in younger participants compared to the older ones. Researchers believe that this might be because reporting was misrepresented in older people who usually expect memory loss as a usual part of aging.

Although there were distinct differences in the timing of the unawareness and the speed of its progression, almost all the people were unaware about their memory difficulties at any point in the disease, explains Dr. Wilson.

Brains of 385 subjects who died during the study period were also examined by the researchers. They assessed these brains for seven types of brain alterations that are common to dementia. They discovered that three dementia-related pathologies were linked with the speedy degeneration in memory:

1.       Tau proteins also known as tangles
2.       Infarcts (areas of brain damage)
3.       Changes in the TDP-43 protein  

As these changes in the brain build up, people fail to realize that their memory is declining.

This study highlights the usefulness of loved ones and family members asking for help from healthcare professionals and doctors getting information from family or friends during the decision making process about whether someone has dementia, since those affected by dementia may not be able to provide decisive information about the case study of their own cognition, says Dr. Wilson.

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