Ageing Flashcards
What are the ages of development as proposed by Laslett (1996)?
First age = childhood
Second age = early adulthood
Third age = “young old” - characterised by less financial responsibilities - resources to make use of ‘free time’
Fourth age = “old old” - ‘final dependence, decrepitude and death’
What are the two theories behind why we age?
Programmed theories and error theories
What is disposable soma theory?
Ageing is a by-product our evolutionary design to maximise chances of reproduction
What are some combination theories (programmed and error)?
Wear and tear Autoimmune responses Somatic mutations 'Cellular garbage' damage Environmental insults
However, a strong genetic influence on longevity (resilience)
What are some cognitive changes associated with ageing?
Changes in sensory systems have an impact on cognition
Decrease in processing speed
Preservation of crystallised intelligence (ability to use skills, knowledge and experience)
Decrease in fluid intelligence (capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations)
Role of practice in maintenance - expertise and wisdom
What are the different forms of memory?
Working memory Long term memory - Semantic (explicit) - Episodic (explicit) - Procedural (implicit)
What happens to memory during ageing?
Individual differences in memory become more marked during ageing
What are most age-related diseases of the CNS associated with?
Dementia
What are the increased neurodegenerative diseases during old age?
Dementia of Alzheimer’s type (DAT) - death of nerve cells
Vascular dementia - reduced blood supply to the brain
Parkinson’s disease - part of the brain becomes progressively damaged
Frontotemporal dementia - two front lobes of the brain damaged
Motor Neurone disease - progressively damages parts of the nervous system
What is mild cognitive impairment?
Refers to people across lifespan who have some functional difficulties with memory
More common in older people
A blurry line between normal ageing, MCI and DAT
Advocate testing for MCI to catch dementia early
What is benign senescent forgetfulness?
Normal ageing
What is dementia?
Essential feature: multiple cognitive deficits that include memory impairment and at least one of the following:
Aphasia - inability to understand or produce speech
Apraxia - inability to perform particular purposive actions
Agnosia - inability to interpret sensations and recognise things
Disturbance in executive functioning - weaknesses in a key set of mental skills
What must deficits be?
Sufficiently severe to cause impairment in occupational or social functioning
Represent a decline from a previously higher level of functioning
What occurs between the speech of young and old people?
Differences between younger people’s intonation, sentence construction, articulation - more questions that might be expected
More temporal framing
More references to differences in age
More ‘troubles’
Corresponding differences in communication style
What is the microsystem?
The system closest to the person and the one in which they have direct contact
