Middle-Age “Senior Moments’’ Just Part Of Aging

Everyone occasionally struggles to remember a name, blanks out on an appointment or forgets why they walked into the other room. But somewhere around age 40, those “senior moments” start to take on a new seriousness. They suddenly seem like scary signs of aging, perhaps harbingers of major memory loss to come. “A few years ago, these complaints were just dismissed,” says Dr. Anne Louise Oaklander, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Now, researchers have become interested in mid-life memory, both to understand their patients’ complaints, and because of the recognition that the seeds of dementia are laid around this time of life.