Silent Strokes Are a New Suspect in Determining Seniors’ Memory Loss

In some cases, memory loss among seniors may be due to so-called “silent strokes,” new research suggests. Such strokes, which may not cause any noticeable symptoms, result in small pockets of dead brain cells and are found in about 25 percent of older adults, the study team noted.

“The new aspect of this study of memory loss in the elderly is that it examines silent strokes and (brain) shrinkage simultaneously,” said study author Dr. Adam Brickman, of the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

 The research, which was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, appeared in the journal Neurology. All the study participants underwent MRI brain scans, as well as testing to gauge their capacities in terms of memory, language skills, thinking speed and visual perception.

 The brain scans revealed that 174 of the 658 participants had experienced silent strokes, and the investigators found that these seniors did not perform as well on the memory exams. This finding held regardless of whether the part of the patient’s brain responsible for memory (the hippocampus) was found to be relatively small or not.

“Given that conditions like Alzheimer’s disease are defined mainly by memory problems, our results may lead to further insight into what causes symptoms and the development of new interventions for prevention,” Dr. Brickman noted. “Since silent strokes and the volume of the hippocampus appeared to be associated with memory loss separately in our study, our results also support stroke prevention as a means for staving off memory problems.”

For more about the research visit http://www.healthfinder.gov/news/newsstory.aspx?Docid=660249