Saturday, March 17, 2012

Memory Loss Causes and Treatments

Memory loss can be so serious if it can affect your daily lives. As you get older, the chance of memory loss will rise. What are memory loss causes? And what you should know for the treatments? Before continuing to read this article, read also a helpful article about ideas to protect your memory!

If you have memory problems (increasingly forgetful) and they interfere with your daily life, you may need to make an appointment with your doctor to get more advices and clearly diagnosis. Don’t wait until your symptoms get worse!

Memory loss causes

As mentioned before, the decreased performance of memory is common in older people. But this process can go more quickly due to some external factors.

There are several factors that can cause memory loss, which may include:
  1. Poor sleep! Either the quantity or quality of your sleep can give a significant effect to the ability of your memory. Waking too often in the night and having too little of sleep per day can cause fatigue, which eventually can interfere with the performance to retrieve & consolidate information.
  2. Poor nutrient intake, particularly deficiencies in B12 & B1! The brain needs good & adequate nutrients to work. Therefore, there are a lot of articles that you can find internet that discuss about good foods to improve the performance of your memory.
  3. Bad habits, particularly such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol, and drug use also can affect your memory.  There are some studies found that smoker and drunker are more likely to have more memory problems than people who are not smoker & drunker.
  4. Uncontrolled stress and depression! People with uncontrolled depression are more likely to become more difficult to concentrate. Stress also has a role in the way of your concentration; therefore keep far away from stress & control it as well! Furthermore, stress due to an emotional trauma also can affect your memory.
  5. The next possible memory loss cause is certain medications. A number of certain prescriptions also can lead to memory loss. Some of these medications may include: sleeping pills, muscle relaxants, antidepressants, pain medications of a certain surgery, tranquilizers, etc. Talk with your doctor for more detailed information about this issue!
  6. A progressive loss of memory which is usually common in older people (85-80 years of age or more), such as dementia. The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. Other possible causes of dementia may include alcohol abuse, factors that can result damage to the brain, drug abuse, and blood vessel problems!
  7. Other memory loss causes may include; head injury, stroke, certain infections that affect to our brain (such as syphilis, tuberculosis, and HIV), thyroid gland, etc.
Memory loss treatments

A medical history is usually needed by the doctor to analysis memory loss. Moreover, the doctor may also need to perform a physical checkup. Then the evaluation may be continued to urine tests, blood tests, imaging & nerve tests of the brain (like MRI or CAT).

Memory loss treatments are closely related & dependent to the cause. Therefore, the successfulness of the treatment is dependent on the cause. If the cause is treatable, then the chance to reverse memory loss is higher than if the cause is untreatable.

For more advices about memory loss causes and treatments, don’t miss to see your doctor (particularly if you in doubt)!

-- Image credit to ‘Getty Images’