Treating underlying conditions, living a healthy lifestyle, and doing crossword puzzles may help.

If you’re like most people ages 50 or older, your power of recall has lost a little wattage. That becomes clear if you often forget where you left your glasses or can’t remember why you walked into a room. Those everyday lapses in memory are normal in middle and older age. Why is that, and can you do anything to change it?

Age-related brain changes

Subtle changes occur everywhere in the body as we get older, including in the brain. Some of those changes affect memory.