“We know little about what happens at midlife in healthy aging and how this relates to findings in late life.”

“Early in our 40s, we may start to notice it’s harder to remember things, like where we left our car keys. But researchers say this decline in memory may not really be a decline at all.

“Rather, they say it may be the result of a change in what information the brain focuses on during memory formation and retrieval.

“‘This change in memory strategy with age may have detrimental effects on day-to-day functions that place emphasis on memory for details such as where you parked your car or when you took your prescriptions,’ says Natasha Raj, associate professor in the psychiatry department at McGill University.

“Brain changes associated with dementia are now thought to arise decades before the onset of symptoms. So a key question in current memory research concerns which changes to the aging brain are normal and which are not.”

Read this Futurity.org article in its entirety here.