Читать книгу You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 20

When it comes to brain problems, it’s not easy to diagnose yourself or a loved one. Yes, you’d like to write off a memory lapse as a natural part of ageing, and in many instances, it is. But this checklist of the eight early signs of Alzheimer’s can help you decide whether you or a family member needs further attention. Do you …

Ask the same questions over and over?

Repeat the same story over and over (and not because your kids are ignoring you yet again)?

Forget how to do something that you normally can do easily (and not as a slick attempt to get your boss to assign the job to the dude in the next cube)?

Get lost in familiar surroundings (and not as a way to avoid being nagged about mowing the lawn)?

Misplace things often (and not because your home has more junk than a city landfill)?

Neglect to bathe (and not as a sexual deterrent)?

Rely on someone else to make decisions you’d normally make yourself (not applicable to men married more than a decade)?

So what’s the biological effect of all this? Well, if you have serious memory-related problems, the grey matter in your brain actually shrivels faster than a centenarian sunbather. And the connections that are so important to maintaining memory get blocked and broken and detoured so that your memory function is slowed – or sometimes lost. In the end, that can cause you to lose the power lines that go to the neighbourhood of fashion trivia or to the office complex of phone numbers or to the cul-de-sac of your anniversary date.

Luckily, as you’ll see, there are several simple ways to restore those power lines, regrow those neural connections and preserve one of the most powerful things you can pass along to the generations that follow: your memory. And your wisdom.