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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."
I just turned 45 and don't feel any decline in my... wait, what were we talking about?
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Any 50-year old could have told you this ;-) However, note that we're talking about a fairly narrow subset of cognition here...
Did they properly consult the AD&D chart for character age? I show INT and especially WIS increasing over time.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Perhaps its age, or perhaps its from years of flouride in the drinking water, BPA in everything we eat, and other poisons like artificial sweetener.
Cognitive function is not all that counts in being successful in life. Emotional intelligence ('maturity'), judgement and experience ('wisdom') might increase with age and might be fair trade for a slight decline in raw processing power. Life can get easier post-50 with these skills.
Surely that means that cognitive decline begins earlier than 45 and the age range they studied was inadequate for measuring the onset of cognitive decline?
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This is why we should move the Social Security retirement age down to 55. It would free up jobs for the young, and let us old folks relax with our monthly check and medicare.
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Once again, Slashdot is the epitome of bad science reporting :)
The study shows that in a group of people ranging from 45 - 70, they found that cognitive decline was present in all of them. That means that cognitive decline begins AT LEAST at 45. TFA says "As early as 45", which is technically true but sort of dishonest IMHO, and the original paper doesn't make any such explicit conclusions.
Sigh.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
The sample age was 45-70 and they found that cognitive decline started at 45? Shouldn't they have started sampling people in their 30's to see a better bell curve?
The fact that even 45 year olds showed decline indicates that it starts earlier than the sample.
I'd be willing to bet it starts a lot younger than 45. I'm in my 30's and I've definitely noticed a difference in the last 10 years. Not a huge difference but a difference nonetheless.
Think about it from an evolution perspective. After we find a mate, have offspring, and make sure they're able to at least somewhat fend for themselves, what do we need sharp cognition for anymore?
giggity
I have to wonder what kind of jobs in the civil service the study group did, whether they were primarily civil service jobs which had more or less the same thing day in, day out - or whether they were civil service jobs that required frequent learning and active problem solving.
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Other research shows that you're not really a grown-up w.r.t. risk taking until age 25.
So you've only got 20 good years. Use them wisely...
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And old was the youngest boss of him? I guess, 45?
Wha? Were you part of the study?
I had a calculus tutor in high school, he was retired and had to have been at least 70, but he was brilliant and his analytical skills don't seem to have declined at all.
I would expect that the amount you exercise your brain, and how healthy you eat/exercise, plays a big role.
Should the Zombie apocalypse occur I would much rather be with him, than a bunch of 44 year olds with nothing but book smarts. Intelligence is important but it's often over emphasized.
Be honest, the reason you want him around is so you won't be the slowest one running away when the zombie stampede starts...
Don't know, can't remember anymore...
Trolling is a art!
If you read the study (I know, nodbody does that), you could see that the test basis are office personell in administration. Compared to students and people working knowledge intesive areas, they do not have to learn that much new facts every day. As other studies (use google if you want) have shown, cognitive skills decline when you reduce the learning. In a German study they have shown that the decline starts earlier in people who left school with 16 and hand a job since then compared to academic personell or researcher who have to learn new stuff every day. The latter group hand only minimal decline in cognitive skills (much less than those shown in the study mentioned above for a 10 year period).
If we lived in a world where the brain had no such limitations, would we send the kids to work as soon as they are able to and then worry about schooling later in their adult life?
"Disturbingly enough, even the youngest participants started declining immediately."
I'd say studies show that participating in studies causes decline.
You're right, there's definitely a flaw in this scientific process: 7,000 subjects (British civil servants), eight authors (of mixed age, gender, and nationality), greater than a decade long study, rigorous statistics, peer review in a well respected journal, and... you.
On the positive side all the people in the test were civil servants, so any cognitive decline wasn't noticeable and had no effect on their ability to perform their jobs!
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Yes, cognitive decline starts early. Nobody expects a 45 year old to be as quick witted as a 25 year old.
But after a cursory scan of the study paper, I think the more interesting revelation is the greater cognitive decline in women vs men in the decade between age 45 and 55. Table 2 on page 8 of the study shows the following:
Difference in score between age 45-49 and 55-59 (percent change):
Facility, Men, Women
Reasoning, -3.2, -11.4
Memory, -3.6, -6.5
Phonemic fluency,-2.9, -6.5
Semantic fluency, -3.4, -7.9
Vocabulary, 1.0, -7.4
(Slashdot's brain damaged 'junk' filter forced me to mangle the table. Apologies.)
This shows a much bigger drop in cognitive performance among women than men. Men fell about 3% in reasoning and memory while women fell 6 to 11 percent, or 2x or 3x FARTHER than men during those 10 years.
The study also attempts to correct these results for education. A greater education diminishes the differential among men by perhaps .5 to 1% (subtractive difference in percentiles) and among women by 2 to 4%.
I hope the authors will follow up with further analyses of this data. Clearly there are more compelling stories to tell than the simplistic takeaway, "Senility starts at 45".
No, because giving them an education makes them better workers. An army of people that can do nothing more than sweep floors, and can't even manage their own finances because they don't know basic math, is not useful for an advanced society. So we give them a basic education first, before sending them out into the world, and the smarter ones or more motivated ones we give an even better education, job training, etc. so they can do higher-level jobs. This wouldn't change if the brain had no age-related limitations. The only thing that'd change is perhaps we'd lose some of our age discrimination.
Be careful with interpretation. The study is about detecting cognitive decline to help predict dementia. In the actual study summary (available through the links in the slashdot summary), the researchers reference other studies that show cognitive decline does not begin until 60 (Seattle study) and 55 (I forget which study). They, the researchers do not dispute this and talk about the need for additional research to determine better techniques to evaluate the decline.
It is not news that cognitive decline occurs with advancing years. The research is about trying to detect the decline that leads to dementia at an earlier time so that treatments can be applied when they will have the most impact. The researchers state that dementia appears to be a process that progresses over 20 to 30 years, so if it manifests itself in the 60s, they are trying to see what evidence there is in the 40s.
From my own personal observations, since I am now beyond the age 45 when they state decline begins. I would agree with that. There are somethings that I am not nearly at good at as I was ten years ago (remembering names of new people I meet or long lists of items). On the other hand, I've done some of my most productive research in the last few years.
My own theory is that for many of the cognitive declines that the study found to be normal, we tend to compensate for (smart phones help tremendously with long lists. Before that PDAs or even daytimers). I also think, though, that with age, comes experience and very often experience provides insight that raw cognitive power might not see. So it is a trade off. There is a reason why we have a stereotype of the wisest people being older people.
Put differently, if you needed heart surgery, would you want the cardiac surgeon just finished with their residency and at their cognitive prime or the 50 yr old surgeon, who has experience a slight decline in cognitive ability, but has performed the particular procedure 500 times?
I have heard that too, and I'll mention Joseph Chilton Pearce remarked on that. He says that in the early 30's many people get one more good boost in comprehension.
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Actually, there is a flaw in the reporting of the study: Cognitive decline begins at 45 at the latest. It may begin earlier, but younger groups were not tested. This is an important distinction.
Not a sentence!
7,000 British civil servants are not sufficient to establish that this is a real effect, it could just as easily be something wrong with the jobs in civil service there are cultural ones related to being British. The age, gender and nationality of the authors doesn't automatically fix possible problems with the sampling. I'm sure that the results are fairly accurate for that particular demographic, but it requires a bit of justification to generalize that beyond that cultural niche.
You should check the meaning of 'cognitive decline'.
While you are at it, you should check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity. Nerves are the same as muscles. We can grow new nerves and muscles by exercising them. Use it or lose it applies to both.
You aren't fated to become senile.
I just turned 46, and this is definitely true. I remember that we invaded Iraq, and I'm sure there must have been valid reasons for that, but I can't remember them. I clearly remember voting for Obama because he was a constitutional law professor who promised to restore civil liberties and the rule of law, but I can't remember anything he did to follow up on that. I seem to remember intentionally flying from SF to NY in 1986 without any form of ID, but obviously that can't be right, because if people had been able to do that for all those years, our country would have been immediately destroyed by terrorists.
Find free books.
Speaking as an old guy (over 50), I probably don't learn new stuff as quickly as I used to. OTOH, I don't really need to, since most of the new stuff is similar to old stuff that I already know.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
No, statistics is a very powerful tool that can provide deep insights and solutions to some otherwise impossible problems. Just because you (and most people) don't understand how to properly use them doesn't mean they're bullshit.