5 ms·

Mild Memory Loss Is Not a Part of Normal Aging, New Research Finds

52 points by cwan 16y ago

reasonattlm 16y ago
http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4902 http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id... "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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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#incidence http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#inciden...
        _delirium 16y ago
        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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
        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.
  - ams6110 16y ago
    Imagine a discovery would allow people to routinely live to 120 years, or more. The financial black hole that is social security NOW would suddenly spike to an even more frightening mass. When government payments fund the livelihood of retired folks, there is a financial disincentive to fund "anti-aging" research.
    - pmichaud 16y ago
      Yeah but you're just imagining ONE part of a really complicated system changing. In fact, when life expectancy goes up and elder quality of life with it, you'll see a shift in society. People will work far longer, they will have multiple careers, etc. Laws will change when the population changes enough.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Excellent, excellent point. I'd give you more Karma if I could. I would mention though, that the process of reclassifying conditions as diseases is also driven by the desire for commercialization itself. Even if the FDA did permit treatment for aging, such treatment could be seen "bleeding edged" or "unnatural" and have a smaller audience. If a symptom of aging could be classified as a disease, a person will have not only the option to obtain treatment but the obligation. "Bob, you have not been getting treatment for your winkle-itis, don't you think that's bit irresponsible?"
twymer 16y ago
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 16y ago
  This article is the first thing I want to forget.
rmorrison 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.
  - joshuacc 16y ago
    I think he was citing those as examples of "fascinating," not saying they provide evidence of a good memory.
  - elai 16y ago
    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.
    - pyre 16y ago
      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).
softbuilder 16y ago
Is inability to focus on text due to 3 glaring Google Ad blocks a sign of aging?
osopoderoso 16y ago
The next research should be surprising: Increase of memory when ageing is only a question of finding a place to grow.
_delirium 16y ago
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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
Groxx 16y ago
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.

52 points by cwan 16y ago

http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4902 http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id... "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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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#incidence http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm#inciden...
      - _delirium 16y ago
        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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
        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.
- ams6110 16y ago
  Imagine a discovery would allow people to routinely live to 120 years, or more. The financial black hole that is social security NOW would suddenly spike to an even more frightening mass. When government payments fund the livelihood of retired folks, there is a financial disincentive to fund "anti-aging" research.
  - pmichaud 16y ago
    Yeah but you're just imagining ONE part of a really complicated system changing. In fact, when life expectancy goes up and elder quality of life with it, you'll see a shift in society. People will work far longer, they will have multiple careers, etc. Laws will change when the population changes enough.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Excellent, excellent point. I'd give you more Karma if I could. I would mention though, that the process of reclassifying conditions as diseases is also driven by the desire for commercialization itself. Even if the FDA did permit treatment for aging, such treatment could be seen "bleeding edged" or "unnatural" and have a smaller audience. If a symptom of aging could be classified as a disease, a person will have not only the option to obtain treatment but the obligation. "Bob, you have not been getting treatment for your winkle-itis, don't you think that's bit irresponsible?"

twymer 16y ago

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 16y ago
This article is the first thing I want to forget.

rmorrison 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.
- joshuacc 16y ago
  I think he was citing those as examples of "fascinating," not saying they provide evidence of a good memory.
- elai 16y ago
  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.
  - pyre 16y ago
    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).

softbuilder 16y ago

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

osopoderoso 16y ago

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

_delirium 16y ago

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.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

Groxx 16y ago

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.