Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Memory and Cognitive Function

Since memory and cognitive problems are a common problem with schizophrenia - I thought the following news would be of interest. Some Notes from the Wall Street Journal:

Our ability to remember peaks "at age 25 and it's all down hill from there," according to CBS News. "Between [ages] 25 and 75, fully two-thirds of the ability to remember names has been lost," one expert on the subject said in the article.

Diseases and bad habits can worsen that decline, of course. Citing a study that appears in the British Medical Journal, NBCSandiego.com noted that older "women who suffer from type 2 diabetes have more memory problems than women who don't have the condition."

While the Scottish Press Association said that "Abusing the highly addictive drug [cocaine] can lead to long-term memory loss." The same is true for another illicit drug, ecstasy, according to an article appearing on the Web site Medical News Today.

But just as some behaviors may impair memory, others may enhance it.

Eating 30% fewer calories "could save memories," says one researcher with the National Institute of Aging, according to NBC10.com. Yet another expert with the University of Southern California says people who consume "one to two glasses of wine a day or (the equivalent in) hard liquor or beer -- had a [substantially] lower risk of Alzheimer's disease," according to the article.

In the future, there's hope that memory loss will become a forgotten problem. Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate who is also an expert on memory, says "clinical trials have started for 'a little red pill,' which he hopes will prove as effective in people as it has in the laboratory," according to the Age. "I think it's quite likely that therapies will become available for age-related memory loss (in humans) over the next five years," he says in the article.