My Spelling is Slipping – Healthy Aging Brain or Sign of Dementia?

As we age, it’s sometimes difficult to know which changes are normal and which aren’t. We expect the wrinkles and weaker muscles. We don’t like them, but we expect them. Mental changes, however, can be much more alarming.

In case you’re worried, these three age-related symptoms are perfectly normal:

• Some loss of the ability to spell.
• “Tip of the tongue” mistakes, where we have trouble bringing up a word we want to use, a word that we “know that we know”
• “Slips of the tongue” when we may reverse the sounds in a word or make some small mistake in pronunciation.

Given the above changes, it’s comforting to know that in the normal aging brain our actual vocabulary can continue to grow.