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On 10/14/2021 at 2:44 PM, caddieman said:

Could be but he has always stumbled over his words. He has always had a speech impediment which I think is most of the reason. And let’s be real it’s definitely not going to be getting any better. Everyone at advanced age is in some sort of mental decline it’s just fact.

 

Would you please give us your definition for "advanced age"?

And then also how your levels of "mental decline" work?

Thanks in advance..  

CL 

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On 10/14/2021 at 2:44 PM, caddieman said:

Could be but he has always stumbled over his words. He has always had a speech impediment which I think is most of the reason. And let’s be real it’s definitely not going to be getting any better. Everyone at advanced age is in some sort of mental decline it’s just fact.

 

Anyone who thinks Biden has a clear mental cognitive process....and that he's in control has issues of their own...    CL

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1 hour ago, miraj said:

Once again..your ignorant arrogance is showing .. “Tika hatta onda ora batta ronda aka aka ora manda rasa ta, etc.,” or as you .. the Bible Thumper says..Sha Naw Naw Han Na Naw

 

And of course....once again the "voice of reason" has weighed  in with the rambling personal attacks....

Why not add something constructive?

CL

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6 hours ago, coorslite21 said:

 

Would you please give us your definition for "advanced age"?

And then also how your levels of "mental decline" work?

Thanks in advance..  

CL 

Cognitive Skills and the Aging Brain
 

Every day we perform hundreds of cognitive tasks but are mostly unaware of the effort involved. These tasks take different forms, such as noticing colors, remembering names, or calculating time on a watch. Measures of brain function using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show that the most active areas of the brain vary according to the task being performed. The data confirm what researchers have known for many years: that our mental functions are composed of many distinct types of cognitive abilities.

Mental abilities change throughout life, first as a result of brain maturation and later with aging of brain cells and their billions of complex interconnections. As people age, their movements and reflexes slow and their hearing and vision weaken. Until the 1990s, most aging research examined cognitive abilities of adults younger than 80. More recent research includes the fast-growing 80s-and-older population and has advanced our understanding of cognitive changes in the elderly. Scientists in a recent study asked, “When does cognitive functioning peak?” 1 and found evidence for considerable variability in the age at which cognitive abilities peak and decline throughout life.

Cognitive Changes with Aging

Certain cognitive abilities show at least a small decline with advanced age in many, but not all, healthy individuals. Although differences between the young and elderly can be shown in some cognitive areas described below, declining ability does not translate into impairment of daily activities. These changes are subtle. The most consistent change is cognitive slowing. For example, on a writing task in which people were asked to substitute as quickly as possible symbols for numbers, 20-year-olds performed the task almost 75 percent faster on average than 75-year olds. Age-related slowing is also evident on certain attentional tasks, such as trying to grasp a telephone number when someone rattles it off quickly. Overall, cognitive slowing is thought to be a contributing factor in elderly people’s higher rate of automobile accidents per miles driven.2

Age hinders attention, particularly when it is necessary to multitask. When switching from one task to another, the elderly have more difficulty paying attention to multiple lanes of traffic, for example, or noticing if someone is about to step off a curb at a busy intersection. Processing information rapidly and dividing attention effectively are cognitive skills that peak in young adulthood. How fortunate it is that college and vocational students are typically at an age when the brain is working with optimum efficiency.

Similarly, the ability to keep multiple pieces of information in mind at the same time is another skill that peaks around ages 18 to 20 and becomes more difficult thereafter. Every time you mentally calculate a tip in a restaurant, you use an information processing skill called “working memory.” In the clinic, we often test working memory by asking people to recite backward a string of numbers that we have just read to them. This task requires working memory because the numbers need to be held in mind long enough to rearrange them.

While memory declines for many people over time, the exact nature of the decline depends on the particular type of memory. To be able to recall an event or new information, the brain must register the information, store it, and then retrieve it when needed. The ability to recall new information, such as reading material, peaks early and gradually becomes more challenging after age 40, particularly for visual material. Studies show that by age 70 the amount of information recalled 30 minutes after hearing a story once is about 75 percent of the amount remembered by an 18-year old.3 Recognizing information from the story is easier than remembering it without any cues, and this ability is usually well retained throughout life. In other words, older adults are less likely than young adults to freely recall most of the information from a recently read news article, but they may be just as good at recognizing the content if someone talks about it.

Language skills develop rapidly throughout childhood and are well retained throughout adulthood, with one exception: Recalling a familiar person’s name or a particular word during conversation commonly becomes harder for adults after age 70. Although this type of word-finding involves memory, the problem lies in accessing the word, even though it exists in the person’s knowledge or vocabulary. Sometimes this problem manifests as a “tip of the tongue” experience—you feel close to recalling the word and may even know that it begins with a given letter. If someone else says the name or word, you easily recognize it. This problem is particularly frustrating because mustering effort to force recollection of the word is likely not to help. The word is apt to pop into mind later when you are going about another activity.

Visual perceptual abilities, principally the ability to understand spatial relationships, also show decline with age, especially after age 80. This weakness causes another driving-related problem, such as not knowing how far away a curb is or how much to turn to parallel-park a car. Visual scanning ability also can diminish so that, for example, it becomes more difficult to see a misplaced object among other items.

Executive functioning refers to higher-level skills, such as conceptualizing a problem, making appropriate decisions, and planning and carrying out effective actions. Older adults tend to be slower in conceptualizing problems and less ready to change strategies when circumstances shift. In one well-known study involving decision making, approximately one-third of older adults did poorly compared to younger adults.4

The task used to assess decision making in this study was the Iowa Gambling Task. Each participant is asked to choose cards one at a time from one of four decks. Some cards bring rewards in the form of play money, and others bring penalties. The goal is to win as much money as possible. Deck selection is based on hunches, and subjects are given immediate feedback. The catch is that the decks have different mixes of reward and penalty cards. In two decks, the reward cards bring relatively low rewards, but the penalty cards bring relatively low penalties, and choosing from these decks brings a net gain in the long term. In the other two decks, the reward cards bring higher rewards, while the penalty cards bring higher penalties too, so that choosing from this deck brings a net loss long-term.

Over time, in the study, young participants tended to shift their performance so that they no longer selected cards from all decks—they selected only from the decks that gave them a net gain. However, a subset of older participants continued to select cards from all decks, resulting in a net loss. These same older participants also were more fooled by deceptive advertising in another experiment.

Findings from studies like these give a possible explanation of why some older adults are at greater risk of falling prey to fraud. Yet for many older adults, difficulty thinking through problems and mental flexibility may not be noticeable until the 80s or beyond.

Cognitive Optimism

Other important cognitive abilities decline little if any with age. Language and vocabulary are well retained throughout the lifespan. In fact, vocabulary continues to improve into middle age. Recall of general knowledge acquired at a young age and well-practiced skills like arithmetic also peak in middle age and are resistant to age-related decline. In general, these age-resistant cognitive skills have been strengthened by experience, including situations that require reasoning and judgment. For example, if asked why many foods need to be cooked, most adults will have no trouble answering based on a lifetime of experience. In addition, older adults often have a better overview of a situation, or better appreciation involving the impact of a single event, than younger people do, because of their greater life experience.

The cognitive operations described above do not exist in isolation. Multiple cognitive skills, such as attention, memory, and reasoning, are involved in performing even simple daily tasks. Some activities require a complex combination of cognitive skills. Among these activities are the social behaviors of everyday life used while shopping, riding a bus or train, dealing with neighbors, or helping a friend. In fact, social skills strongly depend on the cognitive ability to form accurate impressions of others.

Although we have a good understanding of most of the cognitive changes that tend to occur with aging, we understand relatively little about age-related changes in the “social cognition” that we use during social interactions. Social behavior relies on a combination of cognitive and emotional factors, and the influence of aging on these factors is multifaceted. For example, a social impression—an impression of a person one has just met—is built up from factors such as physical appearance, voice quality, facial expressions, and ways the person is behaving. Even though older adults have more limited information-processing capacity, their automatic perceptions of people seem to be intact.

Most of us, particularly as we get older, have had the experience of meeting someone new and a minute later not being able to recall their name. Although usually assumed to be a memory failure, this is actually a failure to fully attend to the name because one is distracted by the broader social interaction, so that the name is not strongly registered in memory. (The trick here is to repeat the name aloud as soon as you hear it, as a confirmation, and then repeat it to yourself silently a couple of more times within a few minutes.)

In this situation, an age-related decline in information-processing speed tends to handicap the older adult. Similarly, age limitations interfere with performance when information acquired in an unfamiliar situation needs to be processed quickly or there are distractions that should be ignored. As a result, older adults on average consider fewer bits of information and use less effective decision-making strategies when they are in unfamiliar situations compared to younger adults.

One view supported in studies of social cognition is that older adults’ limitations in the amount of information that can be processed quickly and accurately are often counterbalanced by increased social expertise from accumulated experience and knowledge.5 Thus, in familiar situations, middle age and older adults, compared to younger adults, tend to make more accurate interpretations of the behaviors of others when prior experience and knowledge helps to focus attention and make it more efficient.  A lifetime’s worth of experiences in social situations can facilitate decision making—and that is sometimes referred to as having wisdom.

Individual Differences in Aging

For most people, cognitive or social decline with aging is minor and influenced by multiple factors.  One factor is called “cognitive reserve.”6 People who are more intelligent at a young age or have better cognitive maintenance through education, occupation, or stimulating activities retain cognitive skills with aging better than those who are less accomplished in these respects. A recent study involving a large number of people in Scotland who had intelligence tests at age 11 and again 50 years later found that the biggest predictor of cognitive ability at the older age was cognitive ability at age 11.7 It is possible that being blessed with the right genes accounted for much of this benefit, although little is known about what genes might be involved.

Having friends and enjoying activities with others also appears to be beneficial. Numerous studies have shown that the level of social engagement, such as the size of a person’s social network or frequency of contacts, promotes cognitive health or reduces risk of dementia.8 Having a purpose in life has been shown to be associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Together these factors help explain the variability we see in how well cognitive function is retained with advanced age.

Normal Brain Aging

Years ago it was widely assumed that the death of neurons, cells that transmit signals throughout the brain, is a common part of aging. We now know that there is little evidence of this. However, the brain does tend to get smaller as people age and a number of changes appear to account for this decrease in size. Each neuron has a cell body and a number of processes called dendrites that extend in many directions toward other neurons for receiving signals. Think of a tree limb with many branches. During aging, the size and complexity and efficiency of this “arborization” decreases, making communication between cells less effective. Each neuron also has an axon that transmits signals from one cell to another; these axons make up the “white matter” in the brain. Damage to white matter tracts with aging contributes to decreased brain size. These and other structural brain changes associated with aging correspond to age-related differences in performance across cognitive tasks. For example, white matter deterioration in the front of the brain has been associated with slower information-processing speed and more difficulty recalling information.

A number of other structural and chemical changes in the brain that occur with aging are not fully understood. One condition is the buildup of a small neuronal protein fragment called amyloid beta, which accumulates to form aggregates of various sizes. Dense conglomerations or “plaques” of these aggregates are characteristic of the brains of Alzheimer patients and are seen to a lesser extent in elderly people with milder cognitive impairment. Alzheimer patients also develop an abnormal version of the neuronal protein tau within brain cells. Converging evidence from multiple types of studies suggests that amyloid plaques trigger the buildup of abnormal tau, which causes neuronal loss that is associated with dementia. Because some adults with dense amyloid beta plaques appear to have normal cognitive function, the relationship between the two is not fully understood.  These adults may have an unknown protective factor. More information is needed from longitudinal studies to know whether the accumulation of amyloid beta aggregates in cognitively intact adults will lead to declining cognitive ability and ultimately Alzheimer’s disease, if a person lives long enough.

With aging come increased risks for vascular disease for many people.  High blood pressure, high levels of the good cholesterol (HDL), high triglyceride levels (a type of fat found in the blood), obesity, and diabetes increase risk of stroke and white matter disease. Keeping the brain healthy through good nutrition and physical activity is important to reduce the risk of cognitive decline associated with vascular disease. A healthy diet includes limiting the intake of sugar and saturated fats, particularly trans fats.  Scientists are learning the many ways in which physical exercise affects the brain, ranging from benefits shown in animal models at the cellular level, such as stimulation of brain-growth factors or reduction in oxidative stress, to a decrease in white matter damage in humans.

An exciting newer area of research, made possible by technical advances in imaging, is the study of age-related changes in brain activity. It is now possible, for example, to monitor brain activity by measuring how much oxygen (fMRI scanning) or sugar (PET scanning) individual brain regions consume. Even simple acts cause widespread activation of multiple brain regions and, by studying the pattern of active areas during a cognitive task, researchers can learn which networks or regions are task-specific. During normal aging, changes occur in the pattern of stimulation of neural networks, causing increased activation in some areas and decreased activation in others. Studies reveal that when an elderly person performs a cognitive task at the same level as that of a young adult, more areas of the former’s frontal brain regions “light up,” suggesting more brain activity is needed to maintain cognitive performance. Many questions still need to be answered in order for science to understand the full impact of aging on brain network function.

Overestimating the Impact of Aging?

It is unclear how much cognitive decline is purely the result of aging of an otherwise healthy brain. Older adults in cognitive studies are more likely than young or middle aged adults to include people with undetected Alzheimer’s dementia, cerebral vascular dementia, and other brain diseases that are more prevalent in people over 70.  In one recent long-term study of older adults, brain diseases detected at autopsy accounted for a large amount of the cognitive decline measured during the study.9 If individuals with undetected early-stage brain diseases are included in studies of normal aging, the amount of measured cognitive decline that is purely age-related will be exaggerated.

Around the world, researchers have made significant progress in understanding factors that influence cognitive health and the related risk of developing dementia. This research has been given high priority because of the devastating personal, family, and societal costs of illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease. Advances have led to an understanding of some genetic and environmental factors but much is still unknown. Currently, an intensive quest is under way to find new treatments to stop, slow, or even prevent Alzheimer’s and related disorders that cause dementia. Providing researchers with the funds necessary to make progress in this search will hopefully lead to the discovery of better ways to reduce late-life cognitive decline.

https://www.dana.org/article/cognitive-skills-and-the-aging-brain-what-to-expect/

 

Edited by caddieman
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1 hour ago, caddieman said:

He is just copying others in this thread. Let’s be fair CL.

First, I didn't insult anyone. I simply commented on your intellect. Which by your defense of Biden actually says more about your character.

Personally I think you're a much better person and know what is right and wrong. Though I don't agree with your thoughts, I must confess I do understand where you are coming from.

My comment about your "superior intellect" is not an insult. It's my recognition of how I believe you see yourself. As is displayed by defending that which 90 percentof the world disagrees with. Thus your thinking must be superior than the rest of Humanity. 

 

Second, the person in question is close to following the path of his previous avatar. Which is why I chose to ignore his violation of forum rules. Others have taken notice. 

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25 minutes ago, ladyGrace'sDaddy said:

First, I didn't insult anyone. I simply commented on your intellect. Which by your defense of Biden actually says more about your character.

Personally I think you're a much better person and know what is right and wrong. Though I don't agree with your thoughts, I must confess I do understand where you are coming from.

My comment about your "superior intellect" is not an insult. It's my recognition of how I believe you see yourself. As is displayed by defending that which 90 percentof the world disagrees with. Thus your thinking must be superior than the rest of Humanity. 

 

Second, the person in question is close to following the path of his previous avatar. Which is why I chose to ignore his violation of forum rules. Others have taken notice. 

Well we disagree 100%………what’s new right?

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2 hours ago, caddieman said:

Cognitive Skills and the Aging Brain
 

Every day we perform hundreds of cognitive tasks but are mostly unaware of the effort involved. These tasks take different forms, such as noticing colors, remembering names, or calculating time on a watch. Measures of brain function using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show that the most active areas of the brain vary according to the task being performed. The data confirm what researchers have known for many years: that our mental functions are composed of many distinct types of cognitive abilities.

Mental abilities change throughout life, first as a result of brain maturation and later with aging of brain cells and their billions of complex interconnections. As people age, their movements and reflexes slow and their hearing and vision weaken. Until the 1990s, most aging research examined cognitive abilities of adults younger than 80. More recent research includes the fast-growing 80s-and-older population and has advanced our understanding of cognitive changes in the elderly. Scientists in a recent study asked, “When does cognitive functioning peak?” 1 and found evidence for considerable variability in the age at which cognitive abilities peak and decline throughout life.

Cognitive Changes with Aging

Certain cognitive abilities show at least a small decline with advanced age in many, but not all, healthy individuals. Although differences between the young and elderly can be shown in some cognitive areas described below, declining ability does not translate into impairment of daily activities. These changes are subtle. The most consistent change is cognitive slowing. For example, on a writing task in which people were asked to substitute as quickly as possible symbols for numbers, 20-year-olds performed the task almost 75 percent faster on average than 75-year olds. Age-related slowing is also evident on certain attentional tasks, such as trying to grasp a telephone number when someone rattles it off quickly. Overall, cognitive slowing is thought to be a contributing factor in elderly people’s higher rate of automobile accidents per miles driven.2

Age hinders attention, particularly when it is necessary to multitask. When switching from one task to another, the elderly have more difficulty paying attention to multiple lanes of traffic, for example, or noticing if someone is about to step off a curb at a busy intersection. Processing information rapidly and dividing attention effectively are cognitive skills that peak in young adulthood. How fortunate it is that college and vocational students are typically at an age when the brain is working with optimum efficiency.

Similarly, the ability to keep multiple pieces of information in mind at the same time is another skill that peaks around ages 18 to 20 and becomes more difficult thereafter. Every time you mentally calculate a tip in a restaurant, you use an information processing skill called “working memory.” In the clinic, we often test working memory by asking people to recite backward a string of numbers that we have just read to them. This task requires working memory because the numbers need to be held in mind long enough to rearrange them.

While memory declines for many people over time, the exact nature of the decline depends on the particular type of memory. To be able to recall an event or new information, the brain must register the information, store it, and then retrieve it when needed. The ability to recall new information, such as reading material, peaks early and gradually becomes more challenging after age 40, particularly for visual material. Studies show that by age 70 the amount of information recalled 30 minutes after hearing a story once is about 75 percent of the amount remembered by an 18-year old.3 Recognizing information from the story is easier than remembering it without any cues, and this ability is usually well retained throughout life. In other words, older adults are less likely than young adults to freely recall most of the information from a recently read news article, but they may be just as good at recognizing the content if someone talks about it.

Language skills develop rapidly throughout childhood and are well retained throughout adulthood, with one exception: Recalling a familiar person’s name or a particular word during conversation commonly becomes harder for adults after age 70. Although this type of word-finding involves memory, the problem lies in accessing the word, even though it exists in the person’s knowledge or vocabulary. Sometimes this problem manifests as a “tip of the tongue” experience—you feel close to recalling the word and may even know that it begins with a given letter. If someone else says the name or word, you easily recognize it. This problem is particularly frustrating because mustering effort to force recollection of the word is likely not to help. The word is apt to pop into mind later when you are going about another activity.

Visual perceptual abilities, principally the ability to understand spatial relationships, also show decline with age, especially after age 80. This weakness causes another driving-related problem, such as not knowing how far away a curb is or how much to turn to parallel-park a car. Visual scanning ability also can diminish so that, for example, it becomes more difficult to see a misplaced object among other items.

Executive functioning refers to higher-level skills, such as conceptualizing a problem, making appropriate decisions, and planning and carrying out effective actions. Older adults tend to be slower in conceptualizing problems and less ready to change strategies when circumstances shift. In one well-known study involving decision making, approximately one-third of older adults did poorly compared to younger adults.4

The task used to assess decision making in this study was the Iowa Gambling Task. Each participant is asked to choose cards one at a time from one of four decks. Some cards bring rewards in the form of play money, and others bring penalties. The goal is to win as much money as possible. Deck selection is based on hunches, and subjects are given immediate feedback. The catch is that the decks have different mixes of reward and penalty cards. In two decks, the reward cards bring relatively low rewards, but the penalty cards bring relatively low penalties, and choosing from these decks brings a net gain in the long term. In the other two decks, the reward cards bring higher rewards, while the penalty cards bring higher penalties too, so that choosing from this deck brings a net loss long-term.

Over time, in the study, young participants tended to shift their performance so that they no longer selected cards from all decks—they selected only from the decks that gave them a net gain. However, a subset of older participants continued to select cards from all decks, resulting in a net loss. These same older participants also were more fooled by deceptive advertising in another experiment.

Findings from studies like these give a possible explanation of why some older adults are at greater risk of falling prey to fraud. Yet for many older adults, difficulty thinking through problems and mental flexibility may not be noticeable until the 80s or beyond.

Cognitive Optimism

Other important cognitive abilities decline little if any with age. Language and vocabulary are well retained throughout the lifespan. In fact, vocabulary continues to improve into middle age. Recall of general knowledge acquired at a young age and well-practiced skills like arithmetic also peak in middle age and are resistant to age-related decline. In general, these age-resistant cognitive skills have been strengthened by experience, including situations that require reasoning and judgment. For example, if asked why many foods need to be cooked, most adults will have no trouble answering based on a lifetime of experience. In addition, older adults often have a better overview of a situation, or better appreciation involving the impact of a single event, than younger people do, because of their greater life experience.

The cognitive operations described above do not exist in isolation. Multiple cognitive skills, such as attention, memory, and reasoning, are involved in performing even simple daily tasks. Some activities require a complex combination of cognitive skills. Among these activities are the social behaviors of everyday life used while shopping, riding a bus or train, dealing with neighbors, or helping a friend. In fact, social skills strongly depend on the cognitive ability to form accurate impressions of others.

Although we have a good understanding of most of the cognitive changes that tend to occur with aging, we understand relatively little about age-related changes in the “social cognition” that we use during social interactions. Social behavior relies on a combination of cognitive and emotional factors, and the influence of aging on these factors is multifaceted. For example, a social impression—an impression of a person one has just met—is built up from factors such as physical appearance, voice quality, facial expressions, and ways the person is behaving. Even though older adults have more limited information-processing capacity, their automatic perceptions of people seem to be intact.

Most of us, particularly as we get older, have had the experience of meeting someone new and a minute later not being able to recall their name. Although usually assumed to be a memory failure, this is actually a failure to fully attend to the name because one is distracted by the broader social interaction, so that the name is not strongly registered in memory. (The trick here is to repeat the name aloud as soon as you hear it, as a confirmation, and then repeat it to yourself silently a couple of more times within a few minutes.)

In this situation, an age-related decline in information-processing speed tends to handicap the older adult. Similarly, age limitations interfere with performance when information acquired in an unfamiliar situation needs to be processed quickly or there are distractions that should be ignored. As a result, older adults on average consider fewer bits of information and use less effective decision-making strategies when they are in unfamiliar situations compared to younger adults.

One view supported in studies of social cognition is that older adults’ limitations in the amount of information that can be processed quickly and accurately are often counterbalanced by increased social expertise from accumulated experience and knowledge.5 Thus, in familiar situations, middle age and older adults, compared to younger adults, tend to make more accurate interpretations of the behaviors of others when prior experience and knowledge helps to focus attention and make it more efficient.  A lifetime’s worth of experiences in social situations can facilitate decision making—and that is sometimes referred to as having wisdom.

Individual Differences in Aging

For most people, cognitive or social decline with aging is minor and influenced by multiple factors.  One factor is called “cognitive reserve.”6 People who are more intelligent at a young age or have better cognitive maintenance through education, occupation, or stimulating activities retain cognitive skills with aging better than those who are less accomplished in these respects. A recent study involving a large number of people in Scotland who had intelligence tests at age 11 and again 50 years later found that the biggest predictor of cognitive ability at the older age was cognitive ability at age 11.7 It is possible that being blessed with the right genes accounted for much of this benefit, although little is known about what genes might be involved.

Having friends and enjoying activities with others also appears to be beneficial. Numerous studies have shown that the level of social engagement, such as the size of a person’s social network or frequency of contacts, promotes cognitive health or reduces risk of dementia.8 Having a purpose in life has been shown to be associated with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Together these factors help explain the variability we see in how well cognitive function is retained with advanced age.

Normal Brain Aging

Years ago it was widely assumed that the death of neurons, cells that transmit signals throughout the brain, is a common part of aging. We now know that there is little evidence of this. However, the brain does tend to get smaller as people age and a number of changes appear to account for this decrease in size. Each neuron has a cell body and a number of processes called dendrites that extend in many directions toward other neurons for receiving signals. Think of a tree limb with many branches. During aging, the size and complexity and efficiency of this “arborization” decreases, making communication between cells less effective. Each neuron also has an axon that transmits signals from one cell to another; these axons make up the “white matter” in the brain. Damage to white matter tracts with aging contributes to decreased brain size. These and other structural brain changes associated with aging correspond to age-related differences in performance across cognitive tasks. For example, white matter deterioration in the front of the brain has been associated with slower information-processing speed and more difficulty recalling information.

A number of other structural and chemical changes in the brain that occur with aging are not fully understood. One condition is the buildup of a small neuronal protein fragment called amyloid beta, which accumulates to form aggregates of various sizes. Dense conglomerations or “plaques” of these aggregates are characteristic of the brains of Alzheimer patients and are seen to a lesser extent in elderly people with milder cognitive impairment. Alzheimer patients also develop an abnormal version of the neuronal protein tau within brain cells. Converging evidence from multiple types of studies suggests that amyloid plaques trigger the buildup of abnormal tau, which causes neuronal loss that is associated with dementia. Because some adults with dense amyloid beta plaques appear to have normal cognitive function, the relationship between the two is not fully understood.  These adults may have an unknown protective factor. More information is needed from longitudinal studies to know whether the accumulation of amyloid beta aggregates in cognitively intact adults will lead to declining cognitive ability and ultimately Alzheimer’s disease, if a person lives long enough.

With aging come increased risks for vascular disease for many people.  High blood pressure, high levels of the good cholesterol (HDL), high triglyceride levels (a type of fat found in the blood), obesity, and diabetes increase risk of stroke and white matter disease. Keeping the brain healthy through good nutrition and physical activity is important to reduce the risk of cognitive decline associated with vascular disease. A healthy diet includes limiting the intake of sugar and saturated fats, particularly trans fats.  Scientists are learning the many ways in which physical exercise affects the brain, ranging from benefits shown in animal models at the cellular level, such as stimulation of brain-growth factors or reduction in oxidative stress, to a decrease in white matter damage in humans.

An exciting newer area of research, made possible by technical advances in imaging, is the study of age-related changes in brain activity. It is now possible, for example, to monitor brain activity by measuring how much oxygen (fMRI scanning) or sugar (PET scanning) individual brain regions consume. Even simple acts cause widespread activation of multiple brain regions and, by studying the pattern of active areas during a cognitive task, researchers can learn which networks or regions are task-specific. During normal aging, changes occur in the pattern of stimulation of neural networks, causing increased activation in some areas and decreased activation in others. Studies reveal that when an elderly person performs a cognitive task at the same level as that of a young adult, more areas of the former’s frontal brain regions “light up,” suggesting more brain activity is needed to maintain cognitive performance. Many questions still need to be answered in order for science to understand the full impact of aging on brain network function.

Overestimating the Impact of Aging?

It is unclear how much cognitive decline is purely the result of aging of an otherwise healthy brain. Older adults in cognitive studies are more likely than young or middle aged adults to include people with undetected Alzheimer’s dementia, cerebral vascular dementia, and other brain diseases that are more prevalent in people over 70.  In one recent long-term study of older adults, brain diseases detected at autopsy accounted for a large amount of the cognitive decline measured during the study.9 If individuals with undetected early-stage brain diseases are included in studies of normal aging, the amount of measured cognitive decline that is purely age-related will be exaggerated.

Around the world, researchers have made significant progress in understanding factors that influence cognitive health and the related risk of developing dementia. This research has been given high priority because of the devastating personal, family, and societal costs of illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease. Advances have led to an understanding of some genetic and environmental factors but much is still unknown. Currently, an intensive quest is under way to find new treatments to stop, slow, or even prevent Alzheimer’s and related disorders that cause dementia. Providing researchers with the funds necessary to make progress in this search will hopefully lead to the discovery of better ways to reduce late-life cognitive decline.

https://www.dana.org/article/cognitive-skills-and-the-aging-brain-what-to-expect/

 

 

 Nice deflection......you didn't answer the question...

How about in your own words....

😮    CL

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2 hours ago, caddieman said:

He is just copying others in this thread. Let’s be fair CL.

 

I believe your ally here in DV is a she....not a he....

 

Of course in todays upside down world a he might believe themselves to be a she.... 

 

Sadly we can't even tell what anyone is because any gender can now venture into any bathroom claiming to be anything they chose.....

 

See now.....I am really showing my, my, my, age and cognitive thought process degeneration.....I'm so confused I can longer tell the difference between a man and a woman....!

 

And sadly......in your world....some how it must be all Trumps fault.....😉

CL

 

 

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49 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

 

I believe your ally here in DV is a she....not a he....

 

Of course in todays upside down world a he might believe themselves to be a she.... 

 

Sadly we can't even tell what anyone is because any gender can now venture into any bathroom claiming to be anything they chose.....

 

See now.....I am really showing my, my, my, age and cognitive thought process degeneration.....I'm so confused I can longer tell the difference between a man and a woman....!

 

And sadly......in your world....some how it must be all Trumps fault.....😉

CL

 

 

Your mind is not as sharp as it used to be it’s just a process of aging. It happens to everyone. Me I think it started about 40 and it gets more rapid as we age. 
Much of the videos made of Biden are chopped up and doctored to make it look much worse. Is he a gaffe machine yep always has been. Is he worse than 30 years ago? Yes. Is he a bumbling idiot like the radical right conspiracy theory sites want you to believe? No. Did he screw up in Afghanistan? Yep. Was he my first choice for President? No. I just knew who I was not voting for. 

Most of those doctored videos are just a result of his speech impediment. That’s all I am saying. 

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1 hour ago, coorslite21 said:

 

I believe your ally here in DV is a she....not a he....

 

Of course in todays upside down world a he might believe themselves to be a she.... 

 

Sadly we can't even tell what anyone is because any gender can now venture into any bathroom claiming to be anything they chose.....

 

See now.....I am really showing my, my, my, age and cognitive thought process degeneration.....I'm so confused I can longer tell the difference between a man and a woman....!

 

And sadly......in your world....some how it must be all Trumps fault.....😉

CL

 

 

 

Shabs.....good to see you are still confused and in the dark....

 

The Caddieman seems to believe that is our lot in life...

Go figure.....😉    CL

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27 minutes ago, caddieman said:

Your mind is not as sharp as it used to be it’s just a process of aging. It happens to everyone. Me I think it started about 40 and it gets more rapid as we age. 
Much of the videos made of Biden are chopped up and doctored to make it look much worse. Is he a gaffe machine yep always has been. Is he worse than 30 years ago? Yes. Is he a bumbling idiot like the radical right conspiracy theory sites want you to believe? No. Did he screw up in Afghanistan? Yep. Was he my first choice for President? No. I just knew who I was not voting for. 

Most of those doctored videos are just a result of his speech impediment. That’s all I am saying. 

 

Wrong.....I've seen those commercials for cialis on the tube about increasing brain function......

 

I have doubled the dosage and am really sharp now...

 

The side affects have been really interesting...😮CL 

 

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27 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

 

Shabs.....good to see you are still confused and in the dark....

 

The Caddieman seems to believe that is our lot in life...

Go figure.....😉    CL

Taking everything out of context seems to be a theme here at DV.

Your mind is not as sharp as when you were 20. Just the facts………..right CL?😉

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7 minutes ago, caddieman said:

Taking everything out of context seems to be a theme here at DV.

Your mind is not as sharp as when you were 20. Just the facts………..right CL?😉

Perhaps you are "following the science"......seems to be a theme lately....

 

When I was 20 I thought I knew it all.....

 

There is a great deal to "experiences in life".....and how they help shape ones decision making....I'll take present day me over the impulsive 20 year old kid I was.... any day and every day...

How about you?    CL 

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8 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

Perhaps you are "following the science"......seems to be a theme lately....

 

When I was 20 I thought I knew it all.....

 

There is a great deal to "experiences in life".....and how they help shape ones decision making....I'll take present day me over the impulsive 20 year old kid I was.... any day and every day...

How about you?    CL 

Me too. But the facts remain that you aren’t as sharp as you were in your 20s……….much smarter? Absolutely. My late father use to always say “If you aren’t learning something new every day you aren’t paying attention”

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On 10/18/2021 at 11:11 PM, coorslite21 said:

 

And of course....once again the "voice of reason" has weighed  in with the rambling personal attacks....

Why not add something constructive?

CL

Constructive would involve focusing as a group on something positive for the overall benefit of the country...not a continuous parroting of news..videos..and heresay that accomplishes nothing.  That was not an attack any more than his claim that his was not, but we all know it was a sneaky go around in the quest to be right and first. I am far from the voice of reason CL..and..I realize I am in a small minority..not the left or the right. I have also been a natural male since birth and plan on remaining so until passing. Enjoy your day. I shall mine. 🙏

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7 minutes ago, bigwave said:

image.png.7796ea9b32f50cc5302eb66436ad938e.png

See what I mean CL..what is constructive about this ? In the scope of politics and lgd's obsession with demInic possession its just killing time. This is not a cut big wave..just an observation. No manner of cliche's or you tube videos and you tube news commentators are making a change..just adding subscribers. The corruption is permanently in place on both sides.

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47 minutes ago, miraj said:

See what I mean CL..what is constructive about this ? In the scope of politics and lgd's obsession with demInic possession its just killing time. This is not a cut big wave..just an observation. No manner of cliche's or you tube videos and you tube news commentators are making a change..just adding subscribers. The corruption is permanently in place on both sides.

As my friend told you, it WAKES people up. Which is why you want to silence it. Go back to sleep everyone, nothing to see 👀 here. 

 

You hated my use of Twitter before as your alter ego. Now you hate YouTube :facepalm1:

Anything that you perceive as a threat to your government handouts must be silenced. 

 

You're so blind that you have no clue what is about to happen to your world. And it's truly sad how people such as yourself don't even want to understand what's happening. 

NEVERTHELESS, the day is here when EVERYONE will understand. Whether you want to or not. 

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6 minutes ago, ladyGrace'sDaddy said:

As my friend told you, it WAKES people up. Which is why you want to silence it. Go back to sleep everyone, nothing to see 👀 here. 

 

You hated my use of Twitter before as your alter ego. Now you hate YouTube :facepalm1:

Anything that you perceive as a threat to your government handouts must be silenced. 

 

You're so blind that you have no clue what is about to happen to your world. And it's truly sad how people such as yourself don't even want to understand what's happening. 

NEVERTHELESS, the day is here when EVERYONE will understand. Whether you want to or not. 

I have no idea about your "Twitter" and I have never met my "alter ego" as you keep referring to. My perception is fine. I actually enjoy You Tube and utilize it quite often. I have no idea what government handouts I am getting, please enlighten me why my world is about to be upended huh..but yours will be fine?

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