HEALTH
How to remember if you took your medication
January 6, 2010
Lesley Ciarula Taylor
STAFF REPORTER
A "gloriously simple" memory jog such as patting your head when you take your medication has dramatic results in preventing older adults from overmedicating themselves, a study says.
Researchers wanted to figure out how older adults could be made to remember hours later if they'd actually done some repetitive but important activity, such as taking daily medication, said Dr. Mark McDaniel, lead author of the study in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition.
Distractions could cloud their memories dramatically, McDaniel, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., told the Star on Tuesday. But adding "an unusual, even silly" gesture to the routine jogged older memories just as significantly, he said.
"The idea would be: you have an older adult, maybe they're taking a foreign-language class and they're practising their vocabulary before they go to class. At the same time, they pop in their medication. Hours later, they think back and wonder, `Did I really take my medication?'"
In a separate experiment, older adults who couldn't remember if they'd taken a pill almost invariably took another one just to be sure, even when they were told not to.
"It's dangerous," said McDaniel, who has written extensively on aging. "Overmedication is a serious problem in older adults."
The gesture could be a pat on the head, crossed arms, a lifted leg, a curled tongue – almost anything that is unusual and distinctive, he said.
"It is gloriously simple, and yet we think it can have a big impact."
He speculated it could work with other panicky memory lapses, such as trying to remember if you shut off the stove before leaving the house.
The researchers also tested the impact of various levels of activity on older adults' memories. In one experiment, they were asked to hit the "F1" key on a computer keyboard in the middle of a simple repetitive task, such as running familiar lyrics through their heads. About five or 10 seconds before and after hitting the key, they slowed down in anticipation and remembered later if they hit the key, he said.
But if a more complicated and distracting task was factored in, such as listening to a series of numbers and hitting the key when two odd ones came in succession, the memory was clouded, he said.
The older adults in the experiments were between 66 and 78 years old.
Toronto Star
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