Healthy Older Adults with Subjective Memory Loss May Be At Increased Risk for Serious Cognitive Diseases

We all rely heavily on situational memory, which gives us the ability to recollect everyday places and names.  When this ability is compromised, it may signal a condition called subjective cognitive impairment. The earliest sign of cognitive decline, Barry Reisberg, from New York University’s Alzheimer’s Disease Center (New York, USA), and colleagues have determined that subjective cognitive impairment among healthy older adults may increase the risk of diseases of advanced memory loss, such as mild cognitive impairment or dementia by more than four-fold.  Studying a group of healthy older adults, ages 40 years or more, for a fourteen-year period, the team found that those subjects with subjective cognitive impairment declined rapidly, at 60% of the rate of non-impaired counterparts.  Additionally, the mean time to decline was 3.5 years longer for non-impaired study subjects than for those with subjective cognitive impairment.   Writing that: “These results indicate that [subjective cognitive impairment] in subjects with normal cognition is a harbinger of further decline in most subjects,” the team urges that “prevention studies in this at-risk population should be explored.”