THURSDAY, Nov. 21, 2024 -- Having achy, painful joints isn't just a physical woe: Coupled with depression, it could also degrade an older person's brain function over time.That's the conclusion of a study of almost 5,000 older Britons tracked for 12 years. People who had both chronic joint pain and depression tended to perform worse on cognitive tests, especially tests focused on memory skills.“Both pain and symptoms of depression act on areas of the brain [mainly the hippocampus] associated with cognitive processing,' explained Brazilian gerontology researcher and study lead author Patrícia Silva Tofani, of the Federal University of Sergipe.She has a theory as to how joint pain and depression might pose a double whammy to brain health.'There’s an overlap of information, causing the brain to become ‘congested’ and have to delegate some functions to process the pain response and the symptoms of depression,' she said in a university news release.
2024年11月21日，星期四——关节疼痛不仅仅是身体上的痛苦：再加上抑郁症，它还可能随着时间的推移降低老年人的大脑功能。这是一项对近5000名英国老年人进行了12年跟踪调查的研究得出的结论。患有慢性关节疼痛和抑郁症的人在认知测试中表现往往较差，尤其是专注于记忆技能的测试。“疼痛和抑郁症状都作用于大脑（主要是海马体）与认知处理相关的区域，”巴西老年医学研究人员兼研究首席作者、塞尔吉佩联邦大学的帕特里夏·席尔瓦·托法尼解释道。她有一个理论，即关节疼痛和抑郁如何可能对大脑健康造成双重打击。“信息重叠，导致大脑“充血”，必须委派一些功能来处理疼痛反应和抑郁症状，”她在一份大学新闻稿中说。
'This would interfere with formation of memory and global cognitive performance. In the study, we saw that over the years, this overload leads to faster cognitive decline.”The findings were published recently in the journal Aging & Mental Health.The study was based on data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging, and looked at data on 4,718 Britons aged 50 or older whose health was tracked for a dozen years.
“这会干扰记忆的形成和整体认知表现。在这项研究中，我们发现多年来，这种超负荷导致认知能力更快下降。”这一发现最近发表在《衰老与心理健康》杂志上。这项研究基于英国老龄化纵向研究的数据，研究了4718名50岁或50岁以上的英国人的数据，这些人的健康状况被追踪了十几年。
Among other things, they were queried as to their levels of any kind of joint pain (for example, of the knee or hip), and any level of depression.Tofani's group also tracked levels of cognition and memory decline over the study period. They looked at six cognitive 'domains': executive function (making decisions and planning and carrying out actions), language, attention, memory, perceptomotor (movement in response to se.
除其他外，他们还被问及他们的任何关节疼痛程度（例如膝盖或臀部），以及任何程度的抑郁。托法尼的研究小组还跟踪了研究期间认知和记忆下降的水平。他们研究了六个认知“领域”：执行功能（做出决策，计划和执行行动），语言，注意力，记忆，感知运动（对se的反应）。