By Katherine Stach

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Forgetting your car keys might be an early wake up call for a more serious memory issue, according to a study by Richard Kryscio, Ph.D., chair of the UK department of biostatistics.

Since 1989, Kryscio, the associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at UK, and a group of researchers have assessed people who notice simple slips of memory to see if they eventually lead to a more serious issue.

This research project assessed 531 elderly people with an average age of 73 that showed no signs of dementia to see if they developed any signs of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) over a 10-year period. MCI is defined as the stage between the expected cognitive decline due to aging and the more serious decline due to dementia. The subjects volunteered to come in yearly to have their brains reassessed and also agreed to donate their brains for research after passing.

At each yearly reassessment the subjects were asked, “Do you feel in the past year that your memory has changed?” and if the subject answered yes, it was referred to as a subjective memory complaint. The complaint was called subjective since it was based on the subject’s own opinion.

“It is common for people to complain about memory,” Kryscio said.  “The question of

interest is does that forewarn you that something more serious is going to happen later on.”

Over time, some subjects began to show signs of memory failure during tasks such as memory tests. “Basically we show that the people that declared an earlier subjective memory complaint were three times more likely to have a future impairment than the ones that did not declare a subjective memory complaint,” Kryscio said.

Out of the 531 subjects assessed, 296 declared a subjective memory complaint. However, only 127 of those died without ever having an actual mild cognitive impairment.

It is also important to look at what comes next in terms of both the study and the treatment.

Kryscio said, “We really would like to characterize the patients who declared subjective memory complaints based on if they had an event later on or not.” This characterization could help researchers determine a high-risk group for future studies used for Alzheimer’s prevention.

The study can help elderly people determine if they should inform their doctor of a possible memory issue so the doctor can evaluate and decide if future action is needed.

“Of course, there are other factors that may contribute to memory loss besides Alzheimer’s, such as a vitamin D12 deficiency or even depression,” Kryscio said.

Despite the additional factors that may contribute to memory loss, Alzheimer’s remains the most common and widespread disorder in the memory loss disorder family, and researchers are trying to fix this issue.