Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Find 70-Year-Olds Are Getting Smarter
Pickens writes "AlphaGalileo reports that researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden have found in a forty-year study of 2,000 seniors that today's 70-year-olds do far better in intelligence tests than their predecessors, making it more difficult to detect dementia in its early stages. 'Using the test results, we've tried to identify people who are at risk of developing dementia,' says Dr. Simona Sacuiu. 'While this worked well for the group of 70-year-olds born in 1901-02, the same tests didn't offer any clues about who will develop dementia in the later generation of 70-year-olds born in 1930.' The 70-year-olds born in 1930 and examined in 2000 performed better in the intelligence tests than their predecessors born in 1901-02 and examined in 1971. 'The improvement can partly be explained by better pre- and neonatal care, better nutrition, higher quality of education, better treatment of high blood pressure and other vascular diseases, and not least the higher intellectual requirements of today's society, where access to advanced technology, television and the Internet has become part of everyday life,' says Sacuiu."
Your logic is flawed.
Concern for caregivers/families != lack of concern for the patients.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If you are locked up in a room, detached from communication with the outside world and people look at you as a piece of furniture, you expire faster.
Besides, same is true of all animals, not only 70 year old homo sapiens. Me and my neighbour got our dogs from the same litter almost 19 years ago.
He left his dog more or less on its own. It was a happy and long living pup, but died demented at an age of 15 and a half.
My dog (blame the SO as much as me) has had extensive health care -- supplements, regular checkups, and uses a DIY robo-wheel-chair for walks now, because the hind legs cannot support the weight anymore. It is still alive (almost 19 years old) and alert, although completely deaf and almost blind from the cataract.
So, yeah, medical care, attention and stimulation work.
What else is new?
Dementia doesn't get anywhere near the funding it should. There's all these cancer charities - mostly focused on breast cancer whereas nobody appears to care about brain cancer or lung cancer (you don't just get it by smoking), while demetia sufferers need far more support, cost far more time and money to treat, and frankly I'd take prostate cancer over altzheimers any day. At least on my death bed I'll be able to remember who my sister is.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
So which is better:
Patient A: 9 years dementia free, 1 year of dementia, death.
Patient B: 1 year dementia free, 9 years of dementia, death.
Or did you genuinely not understand the point being made?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php