Aging Parents: Managing Memory Loss in a Baby Boomer

Early Intervention & Diagnosis Are Crucial to Longterm Outcomes

As our parents, most of them baby boomers, begin to age, it is important to understand the variety of health dynamics we will face over the next several decades. With the life expectancy reaching phenomenal levels, some living into their eighties and nineties, our parents will become more dependent upon us to stay abreast of the latest in medical research and technology.

One area of particular concern to both baby boomers, as well as their adult children, is this continuous research and advancements in memory loss and dementia. Understanding what is normal, age related memory loss, and what is considered dementia or that related to a health condition, is crucial to ensuring the health and safety of our baby boomer parents into the latter part of life.

Memory loss, for most of the adult population, is quite normal. We enter into a realm of stages involving memory loss with most of our parents suffering only mild symptoms associated with aging of the brain. Sometimes this memory loss is organic in nature but at other times it may be related to side effects of medication, changes in lifestyle and, in more and more cases, related to dementia and Alzheimer's.

As baby boomers continue to fledge forward into their retirement years, often, there will be a great discord with their children over the diagnosis and treatment of memory loss. Nonetheless, adult children are encouraged to seek out evaluation of any memory loss in a parent in an effort to negate long term effects when possible.

While there is no one test to clearly diagnose a memory loss, a health care professional will want to examine your parent and take a complete health and physical history, including an inventory of current life stressors which may impact confusion and memory inhibition. Additionally, blood tests to rule out other underlying health complications, cognitive screening tests, EEG and CT scan are quite common.