The memory of young people is deteriorating at a record pace. Science thinks it knows why

The memory problems among youth are beginning to be worrying. This is what a new study scientist published in the magazine Neurology and that tries to answer why this happens and above all the reasons that exist for our youth to begin to be in decline in regards to to your memory.

The surprise. What can logically be expected is that with the passage of time and accompanying aging, memory problems begin to appear that anticipate dementia. But in the United States, after analyzing millions of people, they have seen that the population most affected by this ‘mental fog’ is precisely the youth.

And the result in this case is very important: self-reported cognitive problems among young adults aged 18 to 39 have almost doubled in the last decade. But it is something that we are not understanding.

The study. To reach this conclusion, a total of 4.5 million people who responded to the national survey of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from the CDC and collected between 2013 and 2023. In this way, there was a truly large sample of people to analyze, although limited only to the United States.

The results in this case were quite clear: the prevalence of adults reporting a cognitive disability increased from 5.3% in 2013 to 7.4% in 2024. But what was truly interesting came when separating the results by demographics:

• In young people aged 18 to 39, the rate skyrocketed from 5.1% in 2013 to 9.7% in 2023. This group is, in fact, the driver of the overall increase in the entire population.
• In those over 70 years of age we saw a decrease in prevalence from 7.3% to 6.6%, when logic tells us that it should increase.

Other factors. In order to know the reason for this increase, other factors behind the respondents had to be traced as well. In this case it aimed at the income level:

• Have low income with less than 35,000 dollars a year left us with a prevalence that increased from 8.8% to 12.6%
• With high incomes (>$75,000) the rate was much lower, although it also dropped from 1.8% to 3.9%.

But the same thing happens with the educational level, where young people who did not even have high school went from 11.1% to 14.3% while those with university degrees increased from 2.1% to 3.6%.

And even in order to obtain much more information, they wanted to analyze the prevalence according to the race of young people, where it could also be seen, for example, that Asian adults are the ones who reported the least cognitive problems. Specifically, the data is the following:

• American Indians/Alaska Natives: continue to have the highest prevalence, rising from 7.5% to 11.2%.
• Hispanic adults: saw a significant increase from 6.8% to 9.9%.
• Black adults: The rate rose from 7.3% to 8.2%.
• White adults: increased from 4.5% to 6.3%.
• Asian adults: Consistently maintained the lowest rates, going from 3.9% to 4.8%.

What is happening? With all the data in hand, it is logical to think about what is happening so that young people increasingly have more cognitive problems. And for researchers there is not only one valid answer, but there are several that are being proposed.

The first of them is that there is greater awareness about this problem, and that is why there are more people who raise their hands when presenting it and have no doubts when it comes to seeking help. But there are also other factors such as economic stressors or work problems that seem to be contributing to these trends. All this without forgetting that the greater presence of digital tools may have meant that our memory is not as trained.

But all the social and economic factors we face today can also mark an important milestone when it comes to the real burden on our minds. This ‘overload’ can condition the appearance of these highly relevant cognitive symptoms.

Images | Eliott Reyna Milad Fakurian

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