BROOKLINE – When President Joe Biden was remembered. asked this weeka debate began about whether the 81-year-old was mentally fit to run the country.
“My memory is fine,” Biden defended himself at a press conference Thursday. He continued to talk about tensions in the Gaza Strip and mistakenly referred to the Egyptian leader as the president of Mexico.
“It’s hard to talk about it because I’m 88 years old,” said John Flackett of Brookline. He was sitting on a bench next to his 20-year-old grandson. “I know people who are basically over 100 and they still seem sharp, so I don’t think it’s particularly an age issue,” Finn Flackett said.
After New Hampshire rally, 77-year-old Donald Trump was called out for apparently confusing Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley during a rally in New Hampshire.
President Trump said, “Nikki Haley is in charge of national security.” “I wasn’t even in Washington, D.C., on January 6,” Haley said. “I wasn’t with the president at the time. People say he was deranged. You can’t have anyone else question whether he’s mentally okay,” she said.
“As we age, memory declines slightly,” says Dr. Richard Dupee, chief of geriatrics at Tufts Medical Center. “We call this age-related memory loss, and it affects about 40% of people over the age of 65,” he says.
Bruce Price, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said forgetting names is not necessarily a sign of serious cognitive impairment. “It’s probably a sign of being overwhelmed,” Price said. “I guess we all have acquired attention deficit disorder, so to speak, and there’s always 10 balls in the air.”
He co-founded a research group called the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior. “There are several benefits to normal aging,” he said. “Some people will have wisdom based on their own experience.”