MUDDLING MEMORIES

In the business section of our local newspaper yesterday, I read this most interesting and confusing opening paragraph:

“Figuratively speaking 40 is the percentage of people who were less likely to develop memory loss if they participated in social activities and read magazines during middle age than those who did not, according to a study to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in Seattle.”

Now between you and me, that is just about the most convoluted sentence I’ve ever read and I had to scratch my head several times while trying to figure out what it meant. Regardless of whether the neurologists devised it or the newspaper writers did, whoever did isn’t firing on all neurons, I thought.

To understand it, I finally reconfigured the sentence to read: People who participated in social activities and read magazines during middle age were 40% less likely to develop memory loss than those who did not participate in such activities. Ahh! Now I understand.

I tracked the whole story down on the Internet, and there I found a PR release that had been prepared and issued by a publicist. And while I’m sure she was just reporting from the facts she had been given, the study itself gave me a good laugh.

“The study involved 197 people between the ages of 70 and 89 with mild cognitive impairment, or diagnosed memory loss, and 1,124 people that age with no memory problems. Both groups answered questions about their daily activities within the past year and in middle age, when they were between 50 to 65 years old.”

What struck me about this is that if the data included answers to past events given by people who already had diagnosed memory loss, how in heck can you believe the answer that they gave were even anywhere close to reality!

“Furthermore, the study found that during later years, reading books, playing games, participating in computer activities and doing craft activities such as pottery or quilting led to a 30 to 50 percent decrease in the risk of developing memory loss compared to people who did not do those activities.”

Now I could be wrong, but it seems to me that craft activities “such as pottery or quilting” is hardly stimulating to the mind. I have sat for hours doing counted cross-stitch at 28 crosses to the inch and find it to be enjoyable but certainly not stimulating to the mind. Mind-numbing is a more accurate description. How cross-stitching could help me to not develop memory loss is a really odd thing to consider.

The article also said that “people who watched television for less than seven hours a day in later years were 50 percent less likely to develop memory loss than people who watched for more than seven hours a day.” I also am of the opinion that it is not so many the hours of TV but the type of program watched that would make a difference. In my humble opinion, five hours of soaps is more likely to skew the results than 8 hours of PBS, the History Channel, BookTV or some other such educational TV.

Finally, the article arrived at the coup d’grace:

“This study is exciting because it demonstrates that aging does not need to be a passive process. By simply engaging in cognitive exercise, you can protect against future memory loss,” said study author Yonas Geda, MD, MSc, a neuropsychiatrist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and a member of the American Academy of Neurology."

I don’t understand this conclusion. Aging itself happens, whether we are active or passive. I can be as active mentally as the next guy but I don’t think in the long run that is going to make much of a difference on what I can remember of the past.

For myself, I think I have two things going in my favor: first, I have always kept pen in hand and written down bits of my life, and I’ve always kept scrapbooks of photographs that document things important to me. The fact that I have them and constantly refer to them for one reason or the other (either in doing genealogy or correcting my kids’ perceptions of what happened when they were young) keeps them in front of me and makes it less likely that I will forget. And secondly, I think I have awfully good genes to draw from, from both my mom and my dad. Mom was still writing poetry with her Chaparral poetry group when she died at 71 and dad still had all his marbles when he died at 93 (although sometimes they rolled around a bit!)

I can’t help but think those two things in my life will be a whole lot more meaningful indicators if I’m in the 40% who are less likely to develop memory loss than how many hours I watched TV or read magazines.

The publicist put at the end of her article a final statement by Dr. Geda, the neuropsychiatrist, “Of course, the challenge with this type of research is that we are relying on past memories of the participants, therefore, we need to confirm these findings with additional research.” Seems to me that relying on past memories of people with memory loss is a very misleading research tool. But good luck anyway to the fine group of doctors. I just hope the financial support for this study didn’t come from one of those pork-barrel perks that are funded with our tax dollars.