“Senior Moments” Unrelated to Dementia, University of Virginia Study Shows

Barbara Penn, 78, retired from social services for the County of San Diego, takes three aqua-exercise classes weekly at the MissionValley YMCA. Barbara is a friendly lady who talks to everyone she meets, and she knows a lot of people. One day, while at the class, a woman with whom she had worked waved to her, “Hi, Barbara,” the lady said cheerfully. Barbara smiled and waved back, but then she thought, “What is that woman’s name? I just can’t think of it!”

Rather than embarrass herself, Barbara discreetly asked another class member, “What is the name of that woman in the pink bathing suit?” The other class member obliged and Barbara felt much better.

What happened to Barbara−often known as a “senior moment”− is fairly common. Although frustrating, such scenarios are, fortunately, not related to dementia, according to a recent University of Virginia study.

From the study:

Anecdotal evidence has suggested that tip-of-the-tongue experiences occur more frequently as people get older, but the relationship between these cognitive stumbles and actual memory problems remains unclear, according to University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Salthouse, the lead researcher.

“We wondered whether these self-reports are valid and, if they are, do they truly indicate age-related failures of the type of memory used in the diagnosis of dementia?,” he said.

To find out, Salthouse and University of Virginia undergraduate researcher Arielle Mandell, who was working on her senior thesis, were able to elicit tip-of-the-tongue moments in the laboratory by asking more than 700 participants, ranging in age from 18 to 99, to give the names of famous places, common nouns or famous people based on brief descriptions or pictures.

Throughout the study, participants indicated which answers they knew, which they did not and which made them have a “tip-of-the-tongue experience,” in which they felt they knew the answer, but could not recall it specifically.

Overall, older participants experienced more of these frustrating moments than did their younger counterparts, confirming previous self-report data. But after the researchers accounted for various factors, including participants’ general knowledge, they found no association between frequency of tip-of-the-tongue moments and participants’ performance on the types of memory tests often used in the detection of dementia.

Here is a link to the study.

Since her retirement, Barbara Penn has kept her mind active with meaningful volunteer work. For eight years, she served on the City of San Diego’s Citizens Review Board. “We worked in teams of three to review investigations for clarity and other issues,” she recalled. “Then, we would present our findings to the whole board for possible corrective action. Working on this panel was stimulating and interesting.”

As for her occasional memory blips, Barbara has adopted a healthy philosophy. “Is it so bad if you forget the name of a movie or a celebrity?” she asks with a grin. “It’s no big deal. You can just look it up on the Internet.”

 

Speaking Two Languages Deters Dementia by Nearly 5 Years, Scotland Study Shows

By Pat Rarus

¿como estás?
comment allez-vous?
wie geht es dir?
kamusta ka?

If you can speak just one other language besides English, your chances of delaying or perhaps never getting dementia are greatly enhanced. Those are the results of a recent study by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. As a plus, it doesn’t even matter how fluent you are or how authentic your accent is.

Tracy Miller, a reporter for the New York Daily News, wrote about the Scottish study last November. From the article:

“Those who speak more than one language may enjoy built-in protection against the devastating effects of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study.
People who were bilingual or multilingual developed dementia an average of 4.5 years later than those who spoke only one language, researchers wrote in the journal Neurology.

Dementia refers to symptoms such as memory and attention loss, communication difficulty, and decreased visual perception that result from damage to brain cells. Alzheimer’s, the most common type of dementia, is the fifth leading cause of death for Americans over 65 and is thought to affect 5.2 million people.

This study is the largest to examine the effects of bilingualism on dementia and the first to demonstrate the effects not just for Alzheimer’s but other types of dementia, including vascular and frontotemporal, study author Dr. Thomas Bak of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh told the Daily News.”

The abstract of the study is available here.

Monica Garcia, 57, an Oceanside counselor, learned to speak Spanish in her early 20s out of necessity. Monica, whose maiden name is Voge, married her husband, Victor—a Mexican native—back in 1977. Although Victor learned English as a teenager, his brothers and sisters could only speak Spanish. When various relatives came to live with Monica and Victor—some for a few months; others for a couple of years−Monica needed to communicate with them in their native language. That’s how she learned Spanish.

“I took it in high school for three years,” she recalled, “but then I never used it. In school you learn a lot about Spanish grammar, tenses and other formal parts of the language. When the relatives lived with us, though, I learned phrases the natural way, like the way children learn a language—by osmosis. Of course,” she added, “Victor helped a lot as well.” In addition, Monica watched Spanish-language TV shows and movies.

Today, she is as fluent as a Mexican national and her memory skills are formidable —in both English and Spanish. Monica recently took a memory test that ranked her in the 88^th percentile of people in her age group. Even more impressive are her scholastic achievements. At age 53, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude from California State University San Marcos. “All that studying really involved a lot of memory work,” she said with a smile.