Memory Loss: What's Really Happening

Interviewer: Doctor, as we get older and loose some cognitive function, what's actually happening in our brain as that's going on?

Dr. Puya Yazdi: Once again, that's a spectrum from something as horrible as Alzheimer's where you're getting tons of these plaques all over your brain, which is ripping up neurons and really causing massive amounts of cognitive decline where you're not even just forgetting things, you're personality is changing because of it. That's at the extreme sense, where that's a real disease, that's going to eventually lead to death. Almost everybody is going through cognitive decline.

The best analogy that I can give is one of the easiest organs for you to notice what's going on with is your skin, because it's right on the outside. The way your skin functions is similar to how your brain functions or how your heart functions, or anything else functions. It's a collection of cells put together to make up a tissue. As you notice as you get older and older, you get wrinkles. You're starting to loose color in that skin and so on and so on. That same process goes on at the cellular level in your brain.

What happens as you get older is you get loss of neurons. Neurons that used to connect in certain places are no longer connecting. You're now seeing accumulations of dead pieces of tissue in your brain. At the molecular level, those kinds of processes are going on in all your tissues, and that's sort of what's going on in your brain as you get older, is that you're starting to get loss and death of tissue, and you're not replacing it with new healthy tissue or new healthy connections.