No real need for midlifers to get alarmed about a recent study published in The British Medical Journal that concluded that those senior moments all us aging baby boomers now accept as a normal part of our latest transformation actually begin to happen to people much earlier in life.
In that study which looked at just under 8000 British civil servants three times over the course of a decade or so, the researchers concluded that our memories actually begin to fail in our forties, much earlier than most other studies have found.
The reason not to get too alarmed about this, though, if you just happen to be a 45-year-old who can’t suddenly find his car keys, is that the loss in memory was pretty slight in midlifers, although it did accelerate as people got older so that by the time the study subjects had reached their seventies, some of them had some pretty significant memory problems.
The other important thing to note about memory, though, before you panic, is that as the researchers for this study reminded everyone in their commentaries, there is increasing evidence that paying attention to the factors that raise the risk of heart disease and stroke – controlling cholesterol levels, for example, lowering blood pressure, doing regular exercise, not smoking, and so on – also help reduce the risk of cognitive function decline as we age, including even, if my memory serves me correctly, helping reduce the rate of memory decline.
I've heard that learning a foreign language can help offset age related memory loss. Since I started learning Spanish two years ago, my early memory seems to have improved!