• Preventing Dementia. Part 1.
• Preventing Dementia. Part 2.
• Preventing Dementia. Part 3.

Memory loss and a decline in other mental faculties & cognitive skills are one of the big worries about getting old – and often accepted as being part and parcel of ageing.  And yet the Alzheimer's Society is clear that dementia is NOT a natural part of ageing. They and the NHS state that dementia is preventable, the main focus for them being on preventing vascular dementia.

I believe that the Age Wise! approach can help many people to prevent other types of dementia too by addressing underlying issues which pre-dispose mental and physical decline with age.

Preventing dementia is essential.  According to an editorial in The Lancet (August 2010),  there are 500,000 people with Alzheimer’s disease (the most common form of dementia) in Britain, and this number [based on a straight projection] is set to double by 2050. The NHS will not be able to cope with increased nursing requirements – not to mention the impact on the thousands of carers who are affected. Current medication isn’t working as it is being given too late. The only hope is to detect it earlier – or to prevent it from developing.

Ellen Langer in her book Counter Clockwise challenges this and suggests there may be a more empowering approach.  When we are younger, we may forget something and just accept it in the context of a busy life. (I was so glad to get rid of my microwave – I no longer open the door to re-heat a forgotten cup of tea only to find a previous one sitiing there!).  But when we get older we interpret forgetting something as evidence of our failing memory.  We keep selecting for things we have forgotten as further evidence – and in the end it can become a fixation and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thinking about the cognitive tests used to assess mental ageing.  Who sets them?  Probably someone much younger than the person being tested and whose focus is quite differen.  So it may be that people’s scores are low because the questions asked may have no relevance to them and therefore the information is not retained – nothing to do with their memory.

In the Mental Agility test on the BBC’s Young Ones website, my mental age is down in the teens for the first three, but is scored as for a 78 year old for the ‘Test your Memory’.  I actually have a good memory for things that are important to me and that are presented in a way which makes sense to me.  I just don’t work the way that is needed to satisfy this particular test.

It is often assumed that in Dementia it is the short term memory which is lost.  Professor Langer suggests there is no division between long-term and short-term memory – there is just our memory.  And we are more likely to remember things which are relevant or familiar to us.  So an older person may be more likely to remember things learnt from a book (familiar) than from the internet; remember things from the past when they felt confident and happy in preference to things from the present where they feel out of place.

Having a challenge with remembering people’s names may simply be that you have met so many people that your memory is overloaded with names, or that other aspects of a person are more important to you than their name – nothing to do with memory loss or that you don’t care enough about the person.

Mindless routines prevail in the lives of many older people, for eample in many institutions or where  chronic illness is a major factor.  Ellen Langer suggests that there are three main alternatives to excessive mindlessness – SENILITY, premature death or finding a mindful life.

In which case, senility becomes a means of escape, a positive choice at some level.  Mindful living, fulfilment of Emotional Needs, getting rid of unhelpful beliefs and installing empowering ones, & dealing with past traumas could all play a vital part in PREVENTING dementia – or at least reducing its impact.