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Mind & Mood
Bring a fuzzy memory back into focus
- By Heidi Godman, Executive Editor, Harvard Health Letter
Treating underlying conditions, living a healthy lifestyle, and doing crossword puzzles may help.
If you’re like most people ages 50 or older, your power of recall has lost a little wattage. That becomes clear if you often forget where you left your glasses or can’t remember why you walked into a room. Those everyday lapses in memory are normal in middle and older age. Why is that, and can you do anything to change it?
Age-related brain changes
Subtle changes occur everywhere in the body as we get older, including in the brain. Some of those changes affect memory.
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About the Author
Heidi Godman, Executive Editor, Harvard Health Letter
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As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles.
No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
You might also be interested in…
Improving Memory: Understanding age-related memory loss
By age 60, more than half of adults have concerns about their memory. However, minor memory lapses that occur with age are not usually signs of a serious problem, such as Alzheimer’s disease, but rather the result of normal changes in the structure and function of the brain. This report, Improving Memory: Understanding age-related memory loss, describes these normal age-related changes and other more serious causes of memory loss — and how to distinguish between them.
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