It’s totally normal to misplace your wallet or forget the names of your kids’ friends every so often. But while some memory lapses are no big deal, others could signal a more chronic condition—namely, dementia, a loss of cognitive abilities that includes Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal disorders, and Lewy body dementia.
“Older individuals frequently report difficulties with short-term memory, such as recalling a recently learned name or why they entered a room,” says Babak Tousi, MD, a geriatrician at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Ohio. “But healthy older adults can generally retrieve this previously learned information… which suggests that the information has been stored successfully.”
