Lighter Sleep May Dull Memory Skills in Seniors SUNDAY, Jan. 27
(HealthDay News) -- It's no secret that your memory skills
decline as you get older, making it harder for you to pick up
new tasks or remember where you put your keys. Now, a new study
suggests that the culprit lurks in the lighter sleep that
accompanies aging. Researchers found that older people get less
deep sleep than their younger counterparts, and this appears to
be directly linked to less reliable memory. Older people were
more than 50 percent less able to remember new things after
sleeping than young people. The study, however, isn't
definitive. It was fairly small, mostly looked at women and
examined only one kind of memory -- the ability to remember
pairs of words. Its authors, however, said the findings are
strong enough to justify paying more attention to helping older
people sleep better. "In the young adults, sleep was doing a
really good job at not letting those memories dissolve,"
explained study author Matthew Walker, an associate