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    Home > Medical News > Medical Science News > Research reveals why older people are more forgetful

    Research reveals why older people are more forgetful

    • Last Update: 2020-12-15
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    the timing of brain waves produced while sleeping may affect memory.
    photo Source: iStock.com/Syldavia
    The brain doesn't rest when people sleep. When neurons "talk" to each other, brain waves are transmitted through the brain. Now, researchers have confirmed that people may lose long-term memories when brain waves fail to interact properly. The work may help explain why older people are more forgetful and may lead to new ways to treat memory loss.
    to find out how sleep contributes to memory loss in old age, Randolph Helfrich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his team asked healthy adults in their 70s and 20s to take a memory test. Participants were trained to match common and shorter words such as "bird" with meaningless words made up of random syllables such as "jubu". Once they have learned the combination of these words, meaningless words, they play the "memory" game. Participants had to match the paired words twice: once about 10 minutes after they mastered the task, and second, hours after waking up from a full night's rest. As they slept, the researchers recorded electrical activity in their brains.
    , older people are much less able to remember words in the morning than the young people involved. EE activity records reveal one reason. Two types of brain waves, slow-wave oscillations (which promote large fluctuations in quality sleep) and sleep shuttle waves (short-wave instant bursts), are clear markers of deep, often dreamless, non-rapid eye movement sleep. But these brain waves are not synchronized in the elderly. The researchers reported the
    in the Journal of Science and Technology.
    they believe that this ill-fated activity disrupts communication between parts of the brain that store short- and long-term memories. In fact, helfrich says, the pre-cortique, which stores long-term memories, needs to tell the hippos, the brain region through which all memories pass first, that it is ready to receive information. If the brain waves are not synchronized, this communication is lost and memory is lost.
    to clarify what caused this out-of-step, the researchers analyzed the participants' brains using structural magnetic resonance imaging, which uses radio waves to look at internal organs. They found that the brain regions that produce slow-wave oscillations and long-term memories were smaller among older participants. This suggests that older people are more forgetful because the region shrinks over time. "This atrophy is enough to hurt the mechanism of gathering brain waves together in real time to store memories overnight." Helfrich said. (Source: Science Network Xu Xu)
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