Dr. Majid Fotuhi

there are so many little things that can affect brain function.

And unfortunately, unfortunately, people jump on the A word.

When you have hearing loss or vision loss or these other things, you don't participate in conversations as much.

You're withdrawn.

And those two factors, the fact that you don't challenge your brain and you have withdrawn, you feel isolated, those two factors can literally shrink the brain.

Because you don't stimulate the brain and because you're lonely, those factors shrink this part of the brain I told you about, the hippocampus.

Hippocampus is the size of your thumb.

You have one on the right, one on the left.

And this is ground zero for learning and memory.

And it needs to be stimulated in order to function well.

And when you have many things, heart disease, lung disease, hearing loss, vision loss, anything, anything causes hippocampus to shrink.

And this is the paper that I mentioned to you that I wrote in 1999 about all the factors that can shrink.

Yes.

So then there are three stages.

The stage one is when you have age-associated memory impairment, and it's very easy to fix.

It's very easy to fix.

Then you have a stage called mild cognitive impairment.

At this stage, a person may ask the same question five times.

Let's say you ask your wife, honey, what are we having for dinner tonight?

And she says, oh, we're having spaghetti.