Misplacing keys or blanking on a name doesn’t necessarily point toward dementia, according to Dr. Tommy Wood, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington. He says everyday forgetfulness is far more often a byproduct of stress or fatigue than an early warning sign of neurodegenerative disease.
Wood made the comments to Fox News Digital at Strong New York, the city’s largest annual fitness and wellness festival.
“For most people, it’s just because you’re stressed or you’re tired and weren’t paying attention,” Wood said. “If you want to remember something … you need to actually be focused, be paying attention. You need to tell your brain it’s important to remember it.”
How memory actually works
Wood explained that memory formation happens in three stages: encoding, when a memory is formed; consolidation, when it’s stored; and retrieval, when it’s accessed later.
When someone is stressed or sleep-deprived, the problem usually lies in retrieval — the memory was formed and stored, but the person struggles to pull it up in the moment. That’s different from what happens with neurodegenerative disease, where the memory often never gets encoded in the first place.
“They don’t even remember or notice that there’s something going on,” Wood said. “If you’re noticing something’s not quite right, that’s usually a good sign.”
What dementia actually is — and what causes it
Dementia is clinically defined as a loss of cognitive function severe enough to interfere with a person’s ability to manage daily life independently. Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia together account for 70% to 90% of cases, and many patients show signs of both.
Research indicates that at least half of all dementia cases could be prevented through changes to lifestyle and health risk factors. Wood pointed to heart and metabolic health, along with hearing and vision loss, as key preventable contributors. Addressing those issues directly — through hearing aids or cataract surgery, for example — can lower the risk of cognitive decline, he said.
“If you expect decline, you won’t do the things that will prevent decline from happening,” Wood said. “Believing that it’s possible means you’ll actually engage in these processes, and then through that, you can prevent a lot of this decline.”
Wood’s emphasis on reversible causes of cognitive symptoms lines up with guidance from Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, both of which note that several treatable medical conditions can produce symptoms that mimic early dementia or contribute to subjective cognitive decline.
Cleveland Clinic stresses that early clinical intervention matters when people notice changes in brain fog or executive function.
“How your brain functions on a day-to-day basis is kind of the output of everything your brain is dealing with,” Wood said. “But if you start to notice something, there’s still time to make some changes if you need to.”
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