Television Causes Older Adults to Struggle Recalling Verbal Memories, Study Suggests

A study published in Nature demonstrated that older adults had more difficulty recalling a list of words after a long-term habit of watching TV for more than 3.5 hours daily, reports Medical Daily . The researchers analyzed data on 3,662 adults 50 and older from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging. They focused on baseline TV viewing between 2008 and 2009 and the subjects' cognition six years after the study began. The older subjects who watched more than 3.5 hours of TV every day appeared to be at a higher risk of decline in verbal memory, while exceeding this daily threshold worsened verbal memory. Yet the researchers did not find a direct association between long-term TV exposure and cognitive decline. They noted TV might cause mental stress that potentially contributed to memory loss. "Despite it having been hypothesized for over 25 years that watching excessive television can contribute to the development of dementia, this theory still remains underexplored empirically," the researchers concluded.