This is the conclusion of a recent research published in The British Journal of Psychiatry . Robert H. Pietrzak and a large team of collaborators followed a group of 178 older people without dementia for three years.
Their objective was to analyze the relationship between anxiety, memory function and beta-amyloid peptide load .
Beta-amyloid is the main component of the well-known ‘senile plaques’, a pathological finding frequently found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
The results showed that the anxiety symptoms present in the participants acted as a moderator in the relationship between beta-amyloid protein and the decline in verbal and episodic memory.
Verbal memory refers, for example, to remembering a list of words or a text. Episodic memory refers to learning and remembering experiences such as where I parked the car or who we ate with yesterday.
In addition, anxiety was also associated with greater impairment of executive functions regardless of beta-amyloid load and other factors.
Executive functions refer to our abilities to set goals and organize our behavior to achieve them through planning, problem solving, and other processes.
The research authors suggest the possibility of delaying memory decline through interventions to control anxiety in older people who are now healthy but have a high beta-amyloid level.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
