Alzheimer's Disease Takes Early Toll of Memory Efficiency

When your phone can remember all your favourite numbers, and your computer all the many details of daily life, to a large extent we no longer need to ourselves remember as many items as we used to. We just need to know how to find them.

Some things though - like where you live and what your car (or partner) look like, are vitally important. And these are often lost in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Very early in the onset of the disease though, new research1 indicates that it becomes hard for sufferers to prioritise information - to sift the wheat from the chaff and concentrate on what it is important to remember and what can safely be forgotten. The paper, published in the May 2009 issue of Neuropsychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association, found that the Alzheimer's groups were significantly less efficient than their healthy age peers at remembering items according to their value.

The researchers speculate that people with early-stage Alzheimer's might remember important information better by learning to be more strategic and selective when encoding the most useful information, even though it comes at the expense of less-important information. They believe that improved memory training, emphasizing the relative importance of pieces of data and including strategies for prioritising these, may help reduce this symptom in the early stages of the disease.

1. 1. Washington University in St. Louis Alzheimer's Disease Research Center - Memory Efficiency and the Strategic Control of Attention at Encoding: Impairments of Value-Directed Remembering in Alzheimer’s Disease