Getting older is unavoidable, but falling apart mentally or physically is not. The biological mind-body connection becomes more important as you age. After all, a sound mind won’t do you much good if your body fails.

Loss of memory or cognitive decline shows up in the little things first. You have a harder time calling to mind the names of people and places, you have something at the tip of your tongue but just can’t remember what it is, you go into a room to get something and can’t remember what it was. The prefrontal cortex, which is your search engine for your memory, can’t call it up. Everyone has this happen at some point in their life. When this happens, the hippocampus kicks in to provide other associations to try to jog your memory, but those names and places which used to come easily become more difficult.

Brain-function research shows that as you age the cells throughout your body gradually lose their ability to adapt to stress. In the brain, when neurons get worn down from cellular stress, synapses erode, which eventually severs connections. Dendrites physically wither, and you start losing a signal here or there. Losing a signal here or there isn’t such a big deal at first, because the brain is designed to compensate by rerouting information around dead patches in the network and recruiting other areas to help with trafficking. The good news is your brain is a social network; it thrives on making new connections and is constantly rewiring itself and adapting – provided there’s enough stimulation to spur the growth of new neurons.

Memory is possible because of your neurons. Neurons are electrically excitable cells in the nervous system that process and transmit information. Neurons never actually touch each other. They reach toward each other across a gap (synapse) with their axons and dendrites (tiny hair-like filaments that project out).

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People who have lost brain cells in the hippocampus area of the brain are more likely to develop dementia, researchers report. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that shrinkage of the brain, particularly in the hippocampal area, may be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, occurring years before obvious memory loss and other symptoms appear.

The study, from researchers in the Netherlands, appeared in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. It involved 64 people with Alzheimer’s disease, 44 people with mild cognitive impairment, a less severe form of memory loss that sometimes precedes Alzheimer’s disease, and 34 people with no memory or thinking problems.

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If Alzheimer’s disease runs in your family, you’ve probably given some thought to whether you can escape. A new study provides some insight, scoring 3,375 older people on a list of factors that researchers found predicted the risk of developing dementia. Deborah Barnes, lead author and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco, says that she hopes the system can one day be boiled down into a shorter checklist that can be completed in five to 10 minutes in a doctor’s office. By filtering out some of the more expensive predictors—those involving brain MRIs, for instance—Barnes says she hopes to see an easy, inexpensive index developed one day.

The people studied earned 1 or 2 points for each measure that applies to them, resulting in a score of zero to 15. In the study, 56 percent of people who earned a high score on the index—defined as 8 or more points—developed dementia within six years. Twenty-three percent of those who had moderate scores—4 to 7 points—developed dementia within that time. And 4 percent of those who had low scores—3 or fewer points—ended up with dementia within six years. Since the risk factors are predictive of dementia but are not necessarily causal, Barnes notes, “changing these things would not necessarily mean that you would lower your risk of dementia.”

In case you want to take precautions, here’s a look at the items that make up the index and some steps you can take now to improve your score later in life:
To view the “items that make up the index and some steps you can take to improve your score late in life,” visit the following link: A New Way to Predict Alzheimer’s?