STORY BY

Liz Bennett

You’re in mid-sentence to a friend about your trip when suddenly you draw a blank.

The word you’re trying to find—a simple, ordinary word you’ve used for half a century—vaporized.

You’re standing at the podium to introduce your esteemed colleague and, uh, though you can’t remember his name...he’s a wonderful man, uh...

Just another detail sucked into the vortex of millions of lost details that are supposed to be filed neatly in our brains. Are we losing our memories – and our marbles?

Not really. It’s simply that word retrieval is a common problem for people as we age, explains Joshua I. Breier, PhD and associate professor, Department of Neurosurgery at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, Vivian L. Smith Center for Neurologic Research. At age 60 Breier knows the problem first-hand, and he knows how to handle it.

“Let’s say I’m going through a sentence and I hit a blank spot. I just go ‘A, B, C, D, E, F, G – oh, goat!’ That’s the word I wanted. I can still remember most words, but like most people getting older, I have some minor memory problems.”

In addition, says Breier, he has “word-finding problems,” which people of all ages have, but the difficulty can increase with age. His solution is to “come up with these little tricks to get what I need, or I talk around it. That’s what people with serious word-finding problems do all the time. They produce a kind of speech we call circumlocutional.” He laughs and explains, “They beat around the bush.”

But at what point should you – or members of your family – start worrying that your problem finding the right word is more than simply getting older? How do you tell the difference between natural aging and dementia?

With great difficulty, said authorities at a conference on memory held by the Neuroscience Research Center at the UT Medical School in March. Even experts can’t always distinguish between mild memory problems “that have no significance” and early stages of dementia, explains James A. Ferrendelli, MD, professor and chairman of the Department of Neurology at the medical school. “It requires extensive testing and consultation with experts.”

The first step is to consult a physician, advises Ferrendelli, an authority on the medical diagnosis of dementia. Most competent doctors will admit they can’t immediately recognize the difference between simple aging and dementia and will probably advise you to return a year later for a check-up, he says.

Attention grabbers

Everybody has trouble remembering words at some point, and he adds this provocative twist: The more articulate you are, the more you forget. If you know only a few words, it’s not a big issue. But if you know six different ways to say the same thing you may not use some of the words very often and tend to forget them. It can be extremely frustrating for a verbal person.

How does Ferrendelli suggest handling this problem?  “Use the words frequently that you think are important.”

Breier agrees with Ferrendelli that determining the difference between normal problems of the aging brain and dementia is difficult. “It’s very hard to diagnose dementia, period, until it’s further along. My part in the diagnosis is to decide if a person has a significant thinking problem.” Breier uses specific tests to make his decision, and more than half the people he tests have something else going on: “too much to do, depression, stress. All those things can cause memory problems.”

And you don’t have to be old to have memory problems. They’re often brought on by psychological causes, the most common being depression and anxiety, points out Robert W. Guynn, MD, professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the UT Medical School. He once had a patient, a business professional with a husband and family, who had an astonishing memory loss of almost two years.

“It was brought on by psychological stress or conflict and hard to tackle,” Guynn says.
 
The good news about memory and aging, meanwhile, is that while seniors may have more trouble learning a language or playing the piano than younger people, there are specific things they can do to stay sharp, say the experts. Eat less, for one thing, and exercise. Don’t retire until you have something to retire to – “and it has to be meaningful,” says Ferrendelli.

 But perhaps the best advice from the experts is simply to be more mindful of the little things. A common problem for seniors, (multi-tasking baby boomers and stressed-out juniors) is forgetting where they put everything from eye glasses to keys, and becoming frustrated trying to track them down.

“Here’s a wonderful secret,” Ferrendelli confides, “Pay attention! When you walk into the house, don’t think about going to the bathroom. Think about where you put your car keys.”

UPDATED: 4-14-2006

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