New Research Shows Cognitive Decline Begins At 45

An anonymous reader writes "New research shows people might start to suffer from cognitive decline as early as age 45. The research, which looked at over 7000 people between the ages of 45 and 70 when the study started, watched participants over a 10 year period. Disturbingly enough, even the youngest participants started declining immediately."

Comments

Re:Not all that counts

[Sockatume]

"Cognitive function" in this instance isn't a measure of "raw processing power":

The Alice Heim 4-I (AH4-I) is composed of a series of 65 verbal and mathematical reasoning items of increasing difficulty.18 It tests inductive reasoning, measuring the ability to identify patterns and infer principles and rules. Participants had 10 minutes to do this section. Short term verbal memory was assessed with a 20 word free recall test. Participants were presented a list of 20 one or two syllable words at two second intervals and were then asked to recall in writing as many of the words in any order within two minutes.

We used two measures of verbal fluency: phonemic and semantic.19 Participants were asked to recall in writing as many words beginning with “S” (phonemic fluency) and as many animal names (semantic fluency) as they could. One minute was allowed for each test; the observed range on these tests was 0-35. Vocabulary was assessed with the Mill Hill vocabulary test,20 used in its multiple choice format, consisting of a list of 33 stimulus words ordered by increasing difficulty and six response choices.

Judgement, in particular, would suffer if one's ability to perform inductive reasoning was impaired.

Re:Well crap

[gorzek]

Modern, Western-style civilization is the best population control found to date. Secular society, freely-available contraception, and good medical care all combine to produce plummeting birth rates. We don't really have to do anything about population control. That problem solves itself as a society's focus moves away from having children to personal fulfillment.