Is My Memory Loss Normal or Is It Alzheimer’s?
What’s Normal and What’s Not?
Is this forgetfulness normal?
Many people over the age of 50 (and maybe even younger) experience mild forgetfulness.
Although these are a wake-up call to pay attention to your brain and memory, if the forgetfulness includes:
• Forgetting parts of an experience
• Forgetting where you park the car
• Forgetting events from the distant past
• Forgetting a person’s name, but remembering it later
Then, your memory loss is mild and would be regarded in the ‘normal’ range. It’s worrying though and, in the view of Dr. Allison Lamont, the Memory Doctor, “it’s time to take stock of your lifestyle and memory habits. Memory can be enhanced at this stage.”
When Should I Be Worried?
When you should be worried though, is when your memory loss is affecting your daily living. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive condition that damages areas of the brain involved in memory, intelligence, judgment, language, and behavior. MRi scans are now able to determine what is happening in an Alzheimer’s but, prior to this, doctors have ways of identifying when the memory loss has become more serious.
When Should I Check With My Doctor?
It’s time to check with your doctor, if you, or someone close to you, is:
• Forgetting something you have just done, or an event you have just attended
• Forgetting how to do things that you’ve done many times before, like driving a car or telling the time
• Repeating phrases or stories in the same conversation
• Forgetting ever having known a particular person
• Frequently becoming confused, or seeming ‘far away’
• Having trouble making choices or handling money
• Noticing that forgetting like this has become more frequent over the past six months.
Never accept memory loss as normal – in mild cases, you can do something about it today – check out Seven Second Memory for a memory program that works.
In serious cases, then the sooner you have an accurate diagnosis, the sooner you can take the necessary steps.
For further information, read Nine Secrets of a Sharp Brain After 55 and Keep that Boomer Brain Growing
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This article was reproduced with permission of its author Gillian Eadie, founder of the Brain and Memory Foundation. Gillian is an award-winning educator with more than 20 years as a principal at several prestigious private schools and is a Churchill Fellow. For more free help and personal advice on Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and improving your memory, please visit the Brain and Memory Foundation.
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