
Mild Memory Loss Is Not a Part of Normal Aging, New Research Finds - cwan
http://www.sciencemagnews.com/mild-memory-loss-is-not-a-part-of-normal-aging-new-research-finds.html
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rmorrison
My grandparents are old (mid to late 90s) and still have an incredible memory.
I find their descriptions of the world they grew up in to be fascinating. Some
examples:

* his amazement when he learned that somebody had received a radio signal that was bounced off of the moon

* he worked on a trans atlantic ship in his teenage years during prohibition, and had his first beer in Germany at the age of 16

* depression era job prospects

* walking home from a "picture" after his car was stolen, he and a few friends heard his horn (which was somehow identifiable). They were track runners, so they ran down the car and it turns out it was a young guy who had just borrowed it to go visit his girlfriend, and was on his way to return it.

* his godfather was a civil war vet

~~~
pyre
Those all seem like things that left a lasting impression on your grandparents
(i.e. stronger memory). I wouldn't associate remembering those things with a
lack of mild memory loss.

My grandfather could tell us all kinds of interesting tales in his old age,
but then not remember what he ate for breakfast.

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elai
Can you remember what you ate for breakfast 5 months, 3 weeks and 2 days ago?
Unless you have a small set of habitual foods for a good chunk of time, I bet
you'd forget too.

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pyre
When I was talking about forgetting breakfast, I was talking about the same
day (e.g. being able to recant a story from 30 years ago with surprising
accuracy, but forgetting what you had for breakfast this morning).

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_delirium
I don't get what they mean by "not a part of normal aging" here. What
definition of "normal" are they using? What _is_ part of normal aging?

If it's something that happens almost universally to brain structure as a
function of age, in what sense is it not normal? That doesn't mean we
shouldn't still improve it / stave it off / etc., but I'd classify that more
as, "we've found a way to stop the process by which elderly normally suffer
reduction in memory function".

Sort of how you might say: rubber normally gets brittle as it ages, but with
this new coating, that process is stalled. But that's different from saying:
"hey, new discovery, rubber actually _doesn't_ normally get brittle as it
ages!" I was expecting something like that from the headline, so was expecting
a study that found that e.g. memory loss among the elderly was much less
common than popularly assumed.

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reasonattlm
[http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id...](http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4902)

"The process of declaring parts of aging as a disease is driven by regulation:
the FDA does not permit treatments for aging, only for named diseases. Since
there is little funding for research that cannot be legally commercialized,
the incentive is to carve off chunks of the process of aging and go through
the process of having government employees add it to the list of diseases -
which can take years and millions of dollars. Sarcopenia, for example, is
still not recognized by the FDA, meaning that no potential treatment can be
commercially developed in the US. Here is an example of this process at work
for memory loss."

~~~
orangecat
Freaking ridiculous. In a rational world, the question would be how many
billions of dollars to allocate to anti-aging research. Instead, the
government makes it actively illegal to try to mitigate the major cause of
medical expenses and a huge contributor to decreased quality of life.

~~~
CWuestefeld
A corollary to that longevitymeme quote is the politicization of research. For
example, AIDS research gets funded at a disproportionate rate to the number of
sufferers, presumably because they form an active voting constituency.

So I claim that the question is not "how many billions of dollars to allocate
to anti-aging research".

The real question is how to get government and politics out of the system.
They're the ones that are getting everything discombobulated.

Let people speak with their own actions (and wallets) about how much resource
should be allocated to various areas of medical research.

~~~
prodigal_erik
AIDS and the fear of it affects the lifestyles of most sexually active people,
not just people who actually have the disease (or know someone who does).

~~~
yummyfajitas
Not for rational reasons. In the US, HIV is mostly confined to tiny slices of
the population (gays, blacks, IV drug users).

[http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#inciden...](http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#incidence)

~~~
_delirium
You've just described groups making up about 15-20% of the U.S. population;
that's not really "tiny".

If you follow the links, one of the large slices you don't account for is
"high-risk heterosexual contact", which makes up about 1/3 of new HIV
infections. That's people who are not part of one of the high-risk groups, but
have had at least one partner who was (which may or may not have been known to
them). So the proportion of people who have some rational reason to worry is
relatively high, unless you are _absolutely sure_ that none of your sexual
partners have themselves ever belonged to one of the high-risk groups. That's
a particularly common route of HIV infection among women, since not all
bisexual men self-identify as bisexual or disclose that part of their sexual
history to female partners.

~~~
joe_the_user
With 50K people infected, it's tiny slice of even the gay population.

But _the threat that AIDS represents_ is much larger. Why spend a lot of
resources fixing a tiny hole on a large boat? The hole isn't leaking much?
Well, it's the scary _potential_ that mandates treatment and prevention.

~~~
dgordon
That's the number of new infections in 2006. As HIV/AIDS takes a long time to
run its course, and it stays around for life with a very few exceptions
involving bone marrow transplants from naturally immune people it, I'm certain
that the total number of people infected is at least an order of magnitude
higher. 500,000 people in the US is about one in 600, making it an uncommon
but not especially rare disease.

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twymer
Thanks, I'm now going to cringe every time I hear someone use "sorry I'm
getting old" as an excuse for forgetting something.

~~~
geophile
This article is the first thing I want to forget.

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Groxx
Probably the important part:

> _almost no gradual decline was seen in the absence of lesions._

Where lesions are specific damages to the brain, not _aging_.

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osopoderoso
The next research should be surprising: Increase of memory when ageing is only
a question of finding a place to grow.

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softbuilder
Is inability to focus on text due to 3 glaring Google Ad blocks a sign of
aging?

