An elder Plato walks alongside a younger Aristotle in Raphael's famed School of Athens fresco.
Key points:
- Medical texts from 2,500 years ago rarely mention severe memory loss, although there are more mentions from Ancient Rome than from Ancient Greece.
- The findings suggest today’s widespread dementia stems from modern environments, lifestyles and pollutants.
- The team used today’s Tsimane Amerindians, an Indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, as a demographic model for ancient Romans and Grecians.
A new analysis of classical Greek and Roman medical texts suggests that severe memory loss was extremely rare 2,000 to 2,500 years ago, in the time of Aristotle, Galen and Pliny the Elder. These findings, say the University of Southern California researchers, gives credence to the idea that Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are diseases of modern environments and lifestyles, with sedentary behavior and exposure to air pollution largely to blame.
In the study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers pored over a major body of ancient medical writing by Hippocrates and his followers. The text catalogs ailments of the elderly such as deafness, dizziness and digestive disorders— but makes no mention of memory loss.
However, centuries later in ancient Rome, a few mentions crop up. Galen remarks that at the age of 80, some elderly begin to have difficulty learning new things. Pliny the Elder notes that the senator and famous orator Valerius Messalla Corvinus forgot his own name. Cicero prudently observed that “elderly silliness … is characteristic of irresponsible old men, but not of all old men.”
“The ancient Greeks had very, very few—but we found them—mentions of something that would be like mild cognitive impairment,” said first author Caleb Finch, professor at USC. “When we got to the Romans, and we uncovered at least four statements that suggest rare cases of advanced dementia—we can’t tell if it’s Alzheimer’s. So, there was a progression going from the ancient Greeks to the Romans.”
Finch speculates that as Roman cities grew denser, pollution increased, driving up cases of cognitive decline. In addition, Roman aristocrats used lead cooking vessels, lead water pipes and even added lead acetate into their wine to sweeten it—unknowingly poisoning themselves with the powerful neurotoxin.
In the absence of demographic data for ancient Greece and Rome, Finch turned to a surprising model for ancient aging: today’s Tsimane Amerindians, an Indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon. The Tsimane—like the ancient Greeks and Romans—have a preindustrial lifestyle that is very physically active. A recent study found only 1% of older Tsimane people suffer from dementia, compared with 11% of people aged 65 and older living in the United States.