HEALTH 5

Question 1

Natural aging in the eye

Answer 1

1. The lens is less able to accommodate/ focus

2. Cornea has irregularities

Question 2

Presbyopia

Answer 2

A natural reduction in the eye’s ability to focus on nearby objects, most often due to the lens hardening with time. Corrected with glasses/ contact lenses

Question 3

Senile miosis

Answer 3

A significant age-related reduction in the overall amount of light that reaches the back of the retina, resulting in significant difficulty with seeing in low-light conditions.

Question 4

The combination of presbyopia and senile miosis yields an

Answer 4

ever increasing loss of visual acuity, especially with low light/ luminance stimuli

Question 5

Tinnitus

Answer 5

A persistent ringing in one’s ears, further reducing the sensitivity to quiet sounds and recognizing speech in loud places

Question 6

Aging and hearing

Answer 6

1. Reduction in sensitivity to tones and speech in general, especially in noisy environments
2. Reduced sensitivity to quieter sounds

Question 7

Aging and taste

Answer 7

Taste sensitivity for salt and bitterness decreases, making food generally taste blander.

Question 8

Aging and smell

Answer 8

Measured with an UPSIT test, in which participants have to identify if they smell a particular chemical in ever smaller quantities

Question 9

Aging and Cerebellum

Answer 9

One of the key brain regions that regulates movement; it undergoes natural atrophy of neurons with age, leading to poorer ability to perform fine motor actions

Question 10

Aging and visual motion

Answer 10

Reduced visual motion sensitivity: The visual system become less able to detect fine differences in motion, leading to a poorer feedback loop between vision and action

Question 11

Aging and social changes

Answer 11

Increase in loneliness which in turn is a predictor of maladaptive and stressful aging.

Question 12

Living alone or with strongly reduced ___________ is associated with an over
___ higher risk of developing ___________, such as depression, and ______________ such as Alzheimer’s.

Answer 12

social support, 50%, mental disorders, neurocognitive disorders

Question 13

What cognitive abilities naturally decrease in ability with age?

Answer 13

1. Cognitive speed: there is good evidence that the speed at which older brains can process information (fluid intelligence) is slower; people tend to over emphasize it
2. Working memory: the ability to remember information in the short-term does significantly decrease with age.
3. Episodic memory: the long term memory for specific events that happened in one’s past also slightly decreases.

Question 14

What forms of memory do not change with age?

Answer 14

Procedural memory

Semantic memory

Question 15

Older adults may look worse on average, but ____

Answer 15

they are just actually much more variable

Question 16

Dementia

Answer 16

A broad category of diseases that reduce the ability to think, remember, speak, and control one’s emotions with age

(i.e. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s)

Question 17

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)

Answer 17

The first and very subtle stage of dementia during which patients first start experiencing problems with attention and memory.

50-60% of those diagnosed with MCI will go to a full dementia but the chance id 5 to 7%

MCI IS NOT A NATURAL PART OF AGING

Question 18

What must individuals take to diagnose MCI?

Answer 18

Standardized neurophysiological assessment with a trained clinician and score at least 1.5 standard deviations

Question 19

What are the biggest risk factors for the progression of dementia?

Answer 19

1. Symptom severity
2. Autobiographical and procedural memory loss
3. Brain white matter changes
4. Prescence of the APOE4 allele

Question 20

Alzheimer’s Disease and what area of the brain affects

Answer 20

Significant loss of working and episodic memory, problems with finding words, reasoning, spatial navigation, and issues controlling emotions.

Alzheimer affects the HIPPOCAMPUS (the area related to long term memory formation and spatial navigation)

Question 21

What are the causes of Alzheimer?

Answer 21

Causes are very elusive

1. Genes: twin-studies show that Alzheimer’s is somewhat heritable, but the gene responsible remains very controversial. APOE4
2. Protein build-up: certain proteins and peptides are associated with a build-up that prevents neurons from functioning properly or signals that the brain’s neural connections should be pruned
3. Environmental effects: in many cases, brain damage through concussions has been tied to later emergence of the disease.

Question 22

Predictors of high variability in aging?

Answer 22

Regular exercise

Quality social relationships to offset both physical and cognitive effects of aging.

Question 23

Personal Mastery

Answer 23

A broad construct that includes the ability to control negative emotions and feel s sense of control.

Higher personal mastery - better cardiovascular health in aging,

Physical functioning like motor control, and increased lifespan.

Question 24

Importance of social relationships

Aging effects and romantic partners

Answer 24

Partners often engage in similar healthy or unhealthy behavior together.

Partners provide strong emotional support that offsets many of the frequent stressors related to aging.\

Partners help form new routines that can help social relationships become stronger, helping stress

Personal mastery tends to increase the mastery for their partner.

Question 25

Base-Rate fallacy

Answer 25

The tendency/ bias for human minds to ignore general prevalence information in favor of specific prevalence

Question 26

Breast cancer test : 95% accuracy

15% false positive. What is the probability that you have breast cancer?

Answer 26

Evaluate the result against the general probability that a person in your age-group would have breast cancer, and compare it with the false alarm.

Question 27

“several universities have reported finding the two toxic enzymes that P. gingivalis uses to feed on human tissue in 99 and 96 per cent of 54 human Alzheimer’s brain samples”

Answer 27

They don’t give us the base-rate of finding P. gigivalis in non-Azheimer’s brain samples (imagine if that also turned out to be 99%).

Question 28

Low vitamin D levels independently associated with severe COVID-19 cases

Answer 28

Words like “associated” of “linked to” are used to signal correlation, but in a way that does not transparently lead to readers to recognize them as problematic.

Question 29

Meta-analysis

Answer 29

A statistical method that combines data across (ideally) hundreds of separate data sets in order to give us a better sense of what we can statistically conclude from the available data.

More reliable

Question 30

Anecdotal evidence

Answer 30

Evidence that comes from a single person’s experience rather than a properly done, large-sample study with control groups.

Question 31

How to test causality?

Answer 31

Since experiments are the only way to