Characteristics of cognitive health in older adults do not include

First, there is no memory leak at all, second, the cognitive ability is completely the same as that of young adults, and third, the mood remains stable without any fluctuations.

I have been working at a community geriatric cognitive screening post for almost four years, and I have seen too many family members dragging the elderly who just forgot their house keys to come for a checkup, and then asking, "Is my mother going to get dementia?" In fact, there is really no need to be so nervous. For example, Aunt Zhang, who often comes to our activity room, is 72 years old. She buys groceries and settles accounts faster than a small vendor. She plays mahjong for two hours every afternoon. She wins more and loses less. She occasionally forgets to bring her bus card when she goes out. Last time she went to pick up her grandson, she ran to the wrong school. She turned around and patted her head with a smile, "I'm so confused." When I returned home, I could cook a table of dishes for the whole family. This kind of occasional omission that does not affect normal life is not a sign of cognitive decline at all.

There have been debates on this issue in the academic community before. Some clinical scholars advocate that the boundary between incidental amnesia and pathological decline should be drawn more strictly to avoid missing the early manifestations of Alzheimer's disease. Other scholars who study the neuroscience of aging believe that over-amplifying the harm of amnesia will cause unnecessary cognitive anxiety in the elderly, and long-term anxiety will accelerate the degradation of cognitive functions. My own judgment criteria in practice are actually very simple: as long as the thing you forget is not the core information that just happened (for example, you just said you didn't eat it after eating, and you have no memory of what you just said), and you can remember it when you turn around, or even if you can't remember it, there will be no serious consequences, then it is not a problem at all.

To use an inappropriate analogy, an old man's brain is like an old TV that has been used for decades. It is normal for it to occasionally flash snowflakes and adjust the channel half a beat slowly. As long as the picture and sound can be produced normally, and you can watch your favorite Peking operas and spy dramas, there is no need to take it apart and overhaul it. On the contrary, the more you repair it, the more likely it is to cause problems. Many people always think that cognitively healthy elderly people must be like young people in their twenties and thirties, with a photographic memory and fast reaction speed. This is not in line with the objective laws of aging at all. We must know that the semantic memory and experience judgment ability of the elderly are mostly much stronger than that of the young. Last month we did a cognitive screening. Uncle Li, a 78-year-old retired teacher, made two mistakes on the instant memory questions. He was so scared that he could not recover from sitting there for a long time. As a result, all the subsequent logical reasoning questions were correct, and he scored higher than the 30-year-old son who accompanied him. He was just worried that he would not pass the questions and was distracted.

There is also a common misconception that cognitively healthy elderly people have to be mild-tempered and not take anything personally. Last week, a family member asked me, saying that his father used to be very gentle, but now he gets angry all the time. Is there a cognitive problem? When I asked, I found out that his father was angry because he only came to visit once every half month, and he kept playing with his mobile phone when he came. Who else wouldn't be angry? This has nothing to do with cognitive health. Elderly people who really suffer from cognitive impairment will mostly show blunted emotions. They can't even remember the people and things they care about, let alone have such clear emotional reactions. Of course, if there is a sudden change in temperament for no reason, you really need to seek medical treatment in time. We cannot generalize.

In fact, to put it bluntly, there are not so many hard-and-fast standards for judging the cognitive health of the elderly. They are nothing more than being able to eat and sleep, being able to take care of their own lives, chatting with old friends, and playing chess. A little forgetfulness and a bad temper are normal. Don't apply those rigid health standards to the elderly. Instead, they will frighten good people into problems.