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68<br />
Brain aging: what are the signs?<br />
Lost your keys again? Feeling accident-prone? Does it seem<br />
harder to concentrate these days?<br />
While these signs could just be indications that you’re unwell<br />
or feeling stressed, they are also symptoms of an aging<br />
brain, and some scientists believe that evidence of neural<br />
decline may reveal itself from the age of just thirty.<br />
Invisible changes<br />
While grey hair, stiff joints and laughter lines are all<br />
clear signs that our bodies are aging, the chemical and<br />
structural alterations happening inside our heads are<br />
completely unseen. While our skull size remains the same,<br />
our grey matter reduces in size, with some areas of the<br />
brain shrinking more, and faster, than other parts.<br />
The biggest losses appear in the prefrontal cortex, the<br />
cerebellum and the hippocampus, areas associated with<br />
attention focus, memory, speech, muscle co-ordination<br />
and learning. The wrinkled outer layer of the brain, known<br />
as the cerebral cortex, also thins as we age and this is also<br />
more pronounced in some parts than others.<br />
Other symptoms of an aging brain include decreased<br />
blood flow, less communication between nerve cells and<br />
an increase in inflammation.<br />
Wandering attention<br />
An older person taking a test or doing a job that requires<br />
concentration will probably be more easily distracted<br />
than someone younger. Youngsters have more ability to<br />
‘zone out’ when they are doing an important task (think<br />
about the teenager who does homework while listening<br />
to music and using social media). It’s all linked to our<br />
reduced ability to handle emotional arousal, which means<br />
the more important the task is to us, the more we find<br />
ourselves distracted by outside noises and interruptions.<br />
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