I don’t know if you have such feelings. With the growth of parents’ age, they often say the last sentence, forget the next sentence, forget someone’s name or something, and even turn around and forget when the front foot just happened. Even myself, there are often “fragments” and “amnesia”, such as holding a mobile phone to find a mobile phone, suddenly forgetting what to do after answering the phone, and often saying “old… Old” from the black. Then, will memory really decline with age? Why are you forgetful when you are young? You may also have such experience. You stay up late and resolutely don’t sleep until 12 o’clock; I have to work overtime all night. I have to play my mobile phone for a while before going to bed. I feel sorry if I don’t play my mobile phone. As everyone knows, these behaviors are actually damaging our memory. Because our sympathetic nerves rest at night and stay excited during the day. Only in this way can we keep energetic all day. When you work and rest irregularly, it is difficult for the sympathetic nerve to remain excited during the day, but it may be excited at night. At this time, inattention and memory decline are also inevitable. Of course, this is our daily talking, memory and other cognitive systems make complaints about age damage. A large part of the reason is that it has a great relationship with their metabolic level and cell activity. One of the key factors is the level of calcium in specific cells in the brain.
As we all know, as we grow older, our memory begins to decline and it becomes more and more difficult to learn new things. Normal aging is known to be associated with the loss of cognitive function. Brain regions responsible for learning and memory, including prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, are particularly vulnerable. The anatomical changes associated with age-related cognitive decline are much more subtle than age-related neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, with extensive cell death and characteristic neuropathological changes.
In the past, it was not unreasonable to think that these were caused by the gradual death of brain cells, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. What causes age-related cognitive impairment? Actually, it has something to do with synapses.Synapse is an electrochemical connection between neurons. It uses neurotransmitter molecules to create functional networks in the central nervous system. In this study, the team of Professor Nicholas a. Hartell, Department of neuroscience, psychology and behavior, University of Leicester, studied whether calcium levels in the hippocampus play a role. Most studies in this field focus on postsynaptic cells, that is, cells receiving neurotransmitters, because it is very difficult to measure the calcium level of presynaptic cells. The research team met this challenge by developing a special mouse variety. The mouse expressed a calcium sensitive fluorescent protein in the presynaptic part of the hippocampus. This study used maze and object recognition test to study the cognitive function of rats at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months, and found a significant correlation between cognitive ability and presynaptic calcium level. In the aged mice with poor performance in the experiment, the steady-state process of keeping intracellular calcium within a certain range began to shake, and calcium accumulation was formed in the presynaptic cells of the hippocampus. In the experiment, increasing the level of intracellular presynaptic calcium in the brain of young mice changed the synaptic characteristics and made their behavior similar to that of old mice. The most fascinating of all the results is that the opposite is true: reducing calcium in mouse brain cells can revitalize their synapses, which obviously has great potential significance for human age-related health problems.

Reference

Lima-Silva, T. B., & Yassuda, M. S. (2009). The relationship between memory complaints and age in normal aging. Dementia & neuropsychologia. Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5619225/.

Pereda, D., Al-Osta, I., Okorocha, A. E., Easton, A., & Hartell, N. A. (2019, July 16). Changes in presynaptic calcium signalling accompany age‐related deficits in hippocampal LTP and cognitive impairment. Wiley Online Library. Retrieved October 17, 2021, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.13008.