HEALTH 5 Flashcards
Natural aging in the eye
- The lens is less able to accommodate/ focus
2. Cornea has irregularities
Presbyopia
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
Senile miosis
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.
The combination of presbyopia and senile miosis yields an
ever increasing loss of visual acuity, especially with low light/ luminance stimuli
Tinnitus
A persistent ringing in one’s ears, further reducing the sensitivity to quiet sounds and recognizing speech in loud places
Aging and hearing
- Reduction in sensitivity to tones and speech in general, especially in noisy environments
- Reduced sensitivity to quieter sounds
Aging and taste
Taste sensitivity for salt and bitterness decreases, making food generally taste blander.
Aging and smell
Measured with an UPSIT test, in which participants have to identify if they smell a particular chemical in ever smaller quantities
Aging and Cerebellum
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
Aging and visual motion
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
Aging and social changes
Increase in loneliness which in turn is a predictor of maladaptive and stressful aging.
Living alone or with strongly reduced ___________ is associated with an over
___ higher risk of developing ___________, such as depression, and ______________ such as Alzheimer’s.
social support, 50%, mental disorders, neurocognitive disorders
What cognitive abilities naturally decrease in ability with age?
- 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
- Working memory: the ability to remember information in the short-term does significantly decrease with age.
- Episodic memory: the long term memory for specific events that happened in one’s past also slightly decreases.
What forms of memory do not change with age?
Procedural memory
Semantic memory
Older adults may look worse on average, but ____
they are just actually much more variable
Dementia
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)
Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)
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
What must individuals take to diagnose MCI?
Standardized neurophysiological assessment with a trained clinician and score at least 1.5 standard deviations
What are the biggest risk factors for the progression of dementia?
- Symptom severity
- Autobiographical and procedural memory loss
- Brain white matter changes
- Prescence of the APOE4 allele
Alzheimer’s Disease and what area of the brain affects
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)
What are the causes of Alzheimer?
Causes are very elusive
- Genes: twin-studies show that Alzheimer’s is somewhat heritable, but the gene responsible remains very controversial. APOE4
- 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
- Environmental effects: in many cases, brain damage through concussions has been tied to later emergence of the disease.
Predictors of high variability in aging?
Regular exercise
Quality social relationships to offset both physical and cognitive effects of aging.
Personal Mastery
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.
Importance of social relationships
Aging effects and romantic partners
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.
Base-Rate fallacy
The tendency/ bias for human minds to ignore general prevalence information in favor of specific prevalence
Breast cancer test : 95% accuracy
15% false positive. What is the probability that you have breast cancer?
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.
“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”
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%).
Low vitamin D levels independently associated with severe COVID-19 cases
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.
Meta-analysis
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
Anecdotal evidence
Evidence that comes from a single person’s experience rather than a properly done, large-sample study with control groups.
How to test causality?
Since experiments are the only way to
