4 Reasons People Lose Their Memory

As any elder care provider will reaffirm, losing our memories is something that seems natural as we get older. However, there are some folks that live into their late 90s or even past 100 with their memories staying as sharp as other. What is the difference between the two? Some of the reasons our memories fail might surprise you.

Medications and Their Interactions

Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, research chair at the Montreal Geriatric University Institute, recently completed an in-depth chain of 162 studies on a variety of common drugs taken by seniors, and found out that an amazing number of them had impacts on cognitive ability, ranging from loss of focus (and thus short-term memory) to problems moving memories from short-term to long-term storage, thus leading to problems with what scientists refer to as 'episodic' memory -- the ability to recall how events led to one another.

"Patients need this information so that they are more comfortable talking to their doctors and pharmacists about safer pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatment options," she explained. The medical industry benefits enormously from assigning people to take lots of pills, but a good number of them have perfectly healthy, non-pharmaceutical alternatives. Ask your doctor how many of your pills are actually irreplaceable.

Poor Sleep

Matthew Walker, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley, was the senior author of a recently-released paper that connects lack of deep sleep with memory loss -- and aging with a lack of deep sleep.

"When we are young, we have deep sleep that helps the brain store and retain new facts and information," explained Walker, "But as we get older, the quality of our sleep deteriorates and prevents those memories from being saved by the brain at night."

Why does the quality of sleep deteriorate? There are many potential causes. Sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, incontinence, chronic insomnia, and a host of other problems that get more and more common as we age can all add to the problem.

Is it possible for seniors to get older without needing medications and without losing sleep? Of course -- but those aren't the only potential culprits behind memory loss.

Eating too Much

Yonas Geda of the Mayo Clinic did a study way back in 2006 that he's still following up on today -- a study that showed that people who consume more than 2200 calories each day have twice the risk of Mild Cognitive Impairment that people who consume 1,500 or less calories do.

"People should be very, very careful not to overstretch our findings at this point," Geda says. "Certainly people should not look at those three categories and say, 'Well, if I consume less than 1,500 calories, then I will not have MCI.' That would be the wrong conclusion." The problem is that there are a lot of variables other than calories in your food -- it may be, for example, that the people who regularly overate did so because they were on a blood-sugar addiction cycle that kept them eating low-nutrient-density white carbs -- and it may be the nutrient density, not the absolute caloric value, that's the culprit.

Breaking our Boundaries

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? But University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky has performed a series of studies that prove that even young, nimble minds' ability to remember is so strongly linked to the environment that the learning took place in that they can forget significant amounts of a recent activity or lesson because they're in a different place.

He calls doorways and other environmental shifts "event boundaries", and proven that even virtual event boundaries -- such as walking from one room to another in an entirely VR environment -- can act as a cause for memory loss. The solution? Simple; go back to where you were. Being back in the same environment that a learning opportunity or activity occurred in makes it once again easier for your brain to retrieve the details of that event.

It's certainly not possible to say with confidence that you won't experience memory loss -- but it's obviously possible to do basic things that will help you keep your memory strong. The brain is like a muscle -- not only in that it needs working out, but in that it needs a healthy body to keep it strong. Avoid unnecessary medications, eat right, get plenty of sleep, and you're already doing almost everything you can. Just remember to go back into that room if you need to remember what happened there! If you need more tips, check with a local elder care provider.