Thursday, February 2, 2017

Women’s Cognitive Decline Begins Earlier Than Previously Believed

Is your doctor using Occams' razor to attribute your cognitive decline to stroke rather than looking for the real cause? Or comparing to the correct baseline? This means your doctor should have a cognitive training protocol just for women.
http://dgnews.docguide.com/women-s-cognitive-decline-begins-earlier-previously-believed?
Mental sharpness in women begins to decline as early as their 50s, according to a study published in PLOS ONE.
The study, which followed the same group of healthy women for 10 years after menopause, found that their average decline in mental processing ability was 5% during the decade-long period.
Cognitive processing speed showed an average decline of around 1% every 2 years and verbal memory declined on average around 1% every 5 years.
Previous longitudinal studies have failed to consistently detect these cognitive declines. For the current study, researchers accounted for what are called “practice effects,” which is when repeat testing using the same tests in the same individuals influence the results. Practice effects mask some effects of the menopause transition. In this way they were able to uncover evidence of declines in 2 domains of cognitive functioning -- processing speed and verbal memory.
Arun Karlamangla, MD, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, and colleagues examined data on more than 2,000 healthy women enrolled in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN) who were tested regularly over several years to measure cognitive changes. The women were in their 40s when they enrolled in 1996 and were followed every one to two years for a median period of 6.5 years.
Women in their 40s and 50s who find they are forgetting things more often or think they are slower to react may only be experiencing usual aging, analogous to gradual slowing of physical reaction time, running speed, metabolic rate, and other declines that we all experience in midlife.
SOURCE: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Health Sciences

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