Word: normalized
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...most people, all this will mean reassurance as worrisome symptoms turn out to be nothing at all. "Normal is the new frontier," says Mony de Leon, director of the Center for Brain Health at New York University Tisch Hospital. And for those who do drift beyond that frontier, the same research may offer new hope for treatments and even cures...
Anecdotally, that's no surprise. Approach middle age, and it's hard not to notice that your recall is flickering. This, we're reassured, is perfectly normal--all your friends are complaining about the same thing, aren't they?--and yet it doesn't feel normal. You don't just have your mind, after all; you are your mind, and nothing threatens your well-being so much as the feeling that it's at risk. What's more, while most memory loss is normal, at least some people must be part of the unlucky minority that develops Alzheimer's disease...
...shrinking, the pathway between it and the prefrontal cortex also begins to degrade. Signals peter out and fade away, and questions take their place: Do I know you? Who am I? But it's not just with Alzheimer's: the hippocampus also goes at least somewhat awry in normal memory loss. "It's relatively stable in volume till about 60," Harvard neuroscientist Randy Buckner explains, "and then begins to change. People with Alzheimer's disease, though--they slide off the cliff...
Small and his colleagues have been trying to understand this difference. Small's hunch--now proven--was that a node of the hippocampus different from the one affected in Alzheimer's was breaking down in normal memory loss. "In humans, monkeys and rats," he says, "normal aging targets a node called the dentate gyrus, while a different node--the entorhinal cortex--is relatively spared. But in Alzheimer's disease, it's almost exactly reversed." Small has gone deeper, pinpointing a protein molecule known as RbAp48 that is lower in the brains of people suffering ordinary age-related memory loss...
...known that the brain continues to produce neurons throughout the life cycle, but only in two places: the olfactory bulb and the hippocampus. And not just anywhere in the hippocampus but in the dentate gyrus, the very node that Small has identified as the site of impairment in normal memory loss. So why should memory fade at all? The answer may come from...