What are the characteristics of cognitive health in the elderly?

The core characteristics of cognitive health in the elderly are "matching the normal fluctuations of age + not impairing function + retaining strong plasticity". This is a general consensus reached in the fields of geriatric medicine and cognitive science.

I have been doing cognitive intervention for the elderly in the community for almost three years, and I have seen too many elderly people who meet this characteristic. For example, Aunt Wang who lives in Building 3 is 74 years old. One second she was asking me where I put the cognitive training manual distributed last week, and the next second she explained the manual class process every Wednesday and the special needs of more than 20 elderly people in detail. Occasionally forgetting trivial things is not a problem at all. As long as the executive ability and social functions related to life are not affected at all, it is a healthy cognitive state. In the early years, there were indeed different opinions in the academic circles. Some scholars believed that as long as the cognitive peak ratio decreased compared with that of youth, it was abnormal. However, large-sample follow-up studies in recent years have overturned this conclusion. As long as the cognitive test scores are within the normal range of the same age group and do not delay independent shopping and cooking, social interaction, and development of interests, it is not considered cognitive impairment. After all, you cannot ask a 70-year-old person to have the same memory as a 20-year-old student, right?

Moreover, healthy cognition in old age is far less fragile than everyone thinks, and is so malleable that it often surprises us. Last month we held an interest class on how to use smartphones. There were several elderly people in their 70s who asked their children and grandchildren to teach them how to use short videos at first. After taking the class for 6 weeks, they not only were able to register a taxi by themselves, but also learned how to cut and paste travel vlogs and send them to family groups. They understood it better than many young people. To put it bluntly, this is what everyone often refers to as "cognitive reserve." The more knowledge, experience, and social experience you accumulate when you are young, the more food you will have in your pocket when you are old, the stronger your ability to resist risks, and the longer your cognitive health can be maintained. Of course, there are also small-scale studies that suggest that a small number of "successfully aged" elderly people can maintain memory and logical reasoning skills at about the same level as in middle age even at the age of 80. However, the proportion of this group is still very low. Whether genes play a greater role or long-term exercise, brain use and other lifestyle habits have a greater impact, the academic community has not yet reached a unified conclusion, and is still following up on research.

There is also an interesting feature. Healthy elderly people have more prominent emotion-related cognitive abilities than young people. They are generally more perceptive and empathetic to other people's emotions. There was an 81-year-old Grandma Li before our group. Every time a new nervous and reserved elderly person came, she was the first one to come up and talk to people about household chores, pass them snacks, and was more soothing than our staff. In fact, many people now have misunderstandings about the cognitive health of the elderly. They either think that people must be confused when they get old, and they don’t take it seriously if they forget things, or they sometimes panic that they will get Alzheimer’s disease when they cannot remember things. In fact, as long as they can take care of their lives independently, are willing to deal with people, and have their own interests and hobbies, the cognitive status of most elderly people is healthy and there is no need to be overly anxious.