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

Well crap

[mr1911]

I just turned 45 and don't feel any decline in my... wait, what were we talking about?

Re:Well crap

[dpilot]

The normal curve I've seen, in multiple places, is that cognitive function takes a sudden nosedive at about age 13, and typically recovers in the mid 20s. I wouldn't call that "cognitive decline" however, perhaps "puberty-induced temporary brain damage" would be more to the point.

Re:Well crap

[q.kontinuum]

Maybe this explains the misconception of masturbation leading to brain damage ;-)

Re:Well crap

[blue trane]

Lemme guess - you're over 45.

Re:Well crap

[operagost]

That doesn't make sense to me. It's the 40+ people who start wars, and the 18+ who fight them.

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.

D&D says otherwise

[alphatel]

Did they properly consult the AD&D chart for character age? I show INT and especially WIS increasing over time.

Not all that counts

[wdef]

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.

Re:Not all that counts

[93 Escort Wagon]

In other words, youth and skill are no match for old age and treachery.

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:Not all that counts

[vlm]

"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.

Combine that with

Disturbingly enough, even the youngest participants started declining immediately

And you get the idea that "most people" do not do this, at all, as soon as they leave school. I'd be surprised if the result of a larger study would be anything other than decline begins at the graduation ceremony. I haven't done anything in that test for quite a few years other than the inductive reasoning, and thats only because I'm a weirdo; most Americans would rather die than think, so I'm sure they would do none of the above.

Use it or lose it.

Re:Not all that counts

[jpstanle]

In other words, youth and skill are no match for old age and treachery.

Dad? Is that you?

Huh?

[Bogtha]

Disturbingly enough, even the youngest participants started declining immediately

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?

Re:Huh?

[Trepidity]

The lead author of the study is 51, so you can't really blame her for overlooking a few details...

New retirement age needed

[kurt555gs]

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.

Slashdot fails again

[comrade k]

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.

Re:Is it age?

[somersault]

Don't forget the culture of just sitting in front of the TV/computer, slowly vegetating as you watch the latest reality TV or people miming along to music on YouTube, etc

A lot younger

[mrquagmire]

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?

Re:So... How old was the researcher? I guess 45?

[jeffmeden]

And old was the youngest boss of him? I guess, 45?

Wha? Were you part of the study?

Not so fast

[Brain-Fu]

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.

Re:Not so fast

[q.kontinuum]

This depends if the originator of the research wants to sell you games/riddles to exercise you brain, sports gear, some vitamins or if he wants to do the thinking for you as a paid service. In the latter case all hope is lost, and neither vitamins nor training will help you.

Re:Not so fast

[vlm]

Ah but teaching, even teaching a cognition heavy top, does not necessarily require much cognition. The noncognition memory way to teach is "why I remember back in '63 another young man just like you making the same mistake with integration by parts and what I told him back in '63 was..." Then there is the non-cognition cheerleader way to teach which just amounts to telling you that you can do it. And the non-cognition drill sgt way to teach is just telling you that you will do it.

Calc hasn't changed much in a couple hundred years, at least at the undergrad level. Now a math teaching job that would require some cognition would be designing a "how to prove Fermats last theorem" class. So do you start with the full modularity theorem even though only the semistable elliptic curves are necessary for FLT and the full modularity theorem was proven after FLT, but maybe you should introduce the full theory as a concept and then go in depth into just semi-stable elliptic curves, or ... Now experience does enter into this so you need to correct for that to test pure cognition.

Re:Not so fast

[postbigbang]

We were all born to die. That there is a decline is no mystery, not the age. Some people continue mental fitness, while others screw off on slashdot. Oh, wait...

Re:Not so fast

[Aphoxema]

This isn't really suggesting that all people begin to decline at 45, generally people become more knowledgeable and better able to understand abstract things as they keep adding on the years. Dementia disorders, particularly Alzheimer's, are what is being discussed her and being able to better preempt the diseases with more warning is the benefit of this study.

Really, anyone who throws the idiot blanket over seniors (like I used to) haven't had much experience with healthy and active seniors. There's just a lot of influences convincing most people that being old invariably means incontinence, dementia, sentimentalism, bigotry, an unwillingness to learn and a death-grip on nostalgia.

Even working in nursing homes, where the least functional people tend to find their way to, I've found the most common issue to be physical impairment. This often leads to incontinence because the person could not appropriately eliminate in time, and due to both they often face depression which causes every sort of problem that we perceive to be the norm in old age.

Re:Not so fast

[Mitreya]

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.

Oh, my, how did that get rated +5 insightful? With all due respect, even if your anecdote was not about one vaguely described example, it is still completely pointless and irrelevant
Since that was someone you knew in high school, you probably weren't born when he was under 45. Sadly, there is an excellent chance that he was even more brilliant when he was 30 or 40. The decline is, after all, a relative thing.

Re:Not so fast

[couchslug]

"Really, anyone who throws the idiot blanket over seniors (like I used to)"

Most people are idiots, and don't improve with age.

Re:Not so fast

[hedwards]

I'm not so sure that's really the case. It gets tough to know as such studies usually are conducted on people from the same country. It could well be the same type of reasoning that concludes that adults suck at learning new languages, even though it's common place for adults to have to learn a new one as adults in parts of Africa. I see no basis for assuming that they're smarter or dumber than we are in the US, which leads to interesting questions about what differences there may or may not be.

Also, once one gets to be older one tends to have a greater tendency not to want to learn new things as we're taught that the only value to being elderly is being experienced and experience is ultimately the enemy of learning anything too novel.

Re:Not so fast

[Hatta]

Calc hasn't changed much in a couple hundred years, at least at the undergrad level.

Sure it has. Give an undergrad in Calculus today an exam from 1912 and you'll see just how much it has changed.

Re:Not so fast

[riverat1]

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.

I'm pushing 60 and have noticed that my cognitive abilities have declined. I'm still just as good with stuff I have learned as I used to be, I haven't forgot much. What is declining is the speed that I can learn new stuff. It's takes me more work and time now to pick up on new concepts than it used to.

So I'm not surprised that your calculus tutor is brilliant in a field he's been working in all of his life and perhaps he is one of those exceptional people who don't decline like most but sometimes it's the exception that proves the rule.

Re:Not so fast

[michael_cain]

In any case people tend to compensate through knowledge and experience.

And various sorts of mental crutches. I've lost the reference, but the study suggested that people with higher cognitive skills were more likely to recognize that their skills were declining, and figure out substitutes to make up for the difference, like a greater dependency on "to do" lists. The concluding hypothesis was that this explained some of the observations that people with higher IQs who succumbed to various dementias appeared to decline more rapidly after onset; that the actual onset was missed due to the use of crutches, and the decline appeared more rapid once the dementia had reached a stage where the crutches were no longer sufficient.

Speaking anecdotally, I can still retrieve and explain the real analysis I learned when I was 22. What I can't do, now that I'm approaching 60, is soak up and retain new math at the same pace I could then.

Re:Not so fast

[mcgrew]

Also, once one gets to be older one tends to have a greater tendency not to want to learn new things as we're taught that the only value to being elderly is being experienced and experience is ultimately the enemy of learning anything too novel.

I don't think that's the case; I'm 59 and still love learning new stuff. I'm only experienced at what I have experience with. But I'm more of a creature of habit these days, which I think is a better explanation. My maternal grandfather resisted getting indoor plumbing when I was a kid, and after my uncle built a bathroom onto Grandpa's house, Grandpa still used the outhouse, even in below freezing weather.

I try to drag my dad into the 21st century; It would be nice to be able to email or text him a photo instead of sticking a piece of paper in an envelope like they did three centuries ago, but "I did without a computer and cell phone for eighty years and I don't need one now."

I hope I die before I reach that point. But at any rate, part of being experienced is being experienced at learning to cope with changes to ones tools. Dad was an electrical lineman, and went from climbing poles and using wooden tools to a bucket truck and plastic; I don't think they even use the spike boots for climbing.

When I bitch about MS Outlook I have experience behind me, having been online since 1983. I can say with authority that in thirty years of emailing I've never seen a worse email client, from a user's perspective. Someone fresh out of college would have to have a very solid citation to rebut it (if in fact an opinion can be rebutted).

Re:What about wisdom?

[jeffmeden]

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...

Re:So... How old was the researcher? I guess 45?

[q.kontinuum]

Don't know, can't remember anymore...

Re:Is it age?

[anagama]

Or maybe it is that evolutionary factors are rendered pretty much irrelevant after the hormone raging teens and early 20s -- by then most people who are going to reproduce have and problems that crop up later are not selected out on any sort of widescale pattern. The human body, because of the early procreation tendencies, hasn't adapted for older age, and so there are all kinds of conditions that crop up in middle age that we haven't evolved past by selecting against those.

Or maybe not -- but perhaps more likely fluoride.

Real causes of cognitive decline

[prefec2]

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).

Re:Is it age?

[tunapez]

We are what we eat! I don't doubt proper nutrition plays a role. However, I believe the brain is like any other muscle in our body. Use it and it stays healthy. Stare mindlessly at a screen with nothing but input for hours every night, every week for years and guess what...y0ur mind may not look like that marshmallow ass, but it functions just as well.

Example: I know when clients/friends/family have been playing too much solitaire or wasting idle days staring at the vidiot box(lots more lately across the board), they are cognitively slower, like they're just waking up but it lasts hours. I concur with TFA as far as the older you get the more visible the fogginess. My neighbor, however, just turned 83 and is one smart SOB and fast as a whip with a timely jest or an answer to a pointed question. Him and his wife drive to breakfast with their 4 dogs loaded in the truck like clockwork, 9am everyday for at least the last 15 years. He watches sports and is constantly 'doing'. Smart ass helped me rebuild the trestles outside my bedroom window last Saturday, drilling 8" lags through 4" posts from the top of a 6' ladder, no less. I'm sure his wife being slightly younger(25years) may have something to do with his 'vim', too. YMMV.

Re:Why is this a surprise?

[Grishnakh]

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.

just turned 46

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:So... How old was the researcher? I guess 45?

[Missing.Matter]

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.