I’m often struck these days by the sight of young people — primarily women — lugging around absurdly large containers filled with what I can only assume is some form of hydration assistance. At the coffee shop, their vessels aggressively vie for table space among books, laptops, phones, and empty glasses of matcha chai latte. It makes me wonder if they know something I don’t know of the reliability of public water fountains.
This strikes me as odd, I suppose, because I’ve been recognized to operate for hours during a typical workday without considering the need for a thirst-quenching beverage. It’s a behavioral trait I tell most geezers; we tend not to notice under normal circumstances whenever we need a drink. I’ll pack water when I’m traipsing round the golf course on a sweltering August afternoon (there’s only a lot beer a guy can drink before his pitching wedge betrays him), but apart from those occasions and particularly sweaty gardening sessions, I generally don’t worry an excessive amount of about my hydration levels.
That’s why the outcomes of a recent Penn State University study caught my attention. Researchers there reported a tenuous link between cognitive function and hydration in seniors. Specifically, women who drank not enough — or too much — scored poorly on tests measuring motor speed, focus, memory, and other brain functions. Oddly enough, the same results did not apply to men taking part in the study.
“As we age, our water reserves decline because of reductions in muscle mass, our kidneys dwindle effective at retaining water, and hormonal signals that trigger thirst and motivate water intake become blunted,” lead study author Hilary Bethancourt, PhD, explains in a statement. “Therefore, we felt enjoy it was particularly important to look at cognitive performance with regards to hydration status and intake of water among older adults, who might be underhydrated on a regular basis.”
Or overhydrated. Senior study author Asher Rosinger, PhD, adds that drinking too much “may be just as detrimental to cognitive performance as dehydration for seniors.” There’s apparently a sweet spot between an excessive amount of and too few fluids which will keep our aging brains operating at somewhere near capacity.
Bethancourt and her team recruited a couple of,500 volunteers 60 years old or older and asked them to report their food and drink consumption from the previous day. Researchers calculated hydration levels based on the amount of sodium, potassium, glucose, and urea nitrogen in volunteers’ blood as well as the water content of their diets before subjecting these to cognitive tests measuring verbal recall, verbal fluency, memory, sustained attention span, and processing speed.
After accounting for education, sleep quality, exercise, and diabetes status, the study found that women were particularly prone to cognitive lapses when under- or overhydrated, while men were unaffected.
Researchers can’t really explain why old male brains seem safe from the effects of hydration, nor are they completely sure whether poor hydration causes cognitive impairment or whether those people who are cognitively impaired tend to be poorly hydrated.
My own muddled brain shows that it’s not just the female cerebellum that is affected with suboptimal fluid intake. And it doesn’t much matter in my experience whether it’s a cause or perhaps a correlation. It probably can’t hurt to pay for a little more attention to whatever thirst signals my aging brain sends me. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m likely to start lugging around a half-gallon of water everywhere I go. The water fountains are working just fine.
Last time I checked, anyway.
