And now the bad news...

Time to suck it up and do the reality check: Alzheimer's currently aflicts some 4.5 million people. When the Baby Boomers reach 2050, it's estimated that as many as 16 million of us will have the disease.

But there is a difference between AD (Alzheimer's Disease) and just the vagaries of the dimming mind of the aging.

Elderly people frequently experience episodes where they forget unimportant things. Studies of healthy adults show that a 75-year-old trying to remember someone's name performs 65 percent worse than a 25-year-old. This type of memory loss is "age associated memory impairment." Signs of age associated memory impairment are noted as early as a person's 30s and increase with each decade, so that by age 70 more than half of normal adults show problems with working memory (the ability to manipulate memories, such as performing such such calculations without the aid of pen and paper).

In the article, Aging and Memory: Understand the difference between forgetting and Alzheimer's, author Deborah Gelinas MD, does a good job of point out just how grim it can be for those of us destined to forget, well, everything. But it's a good short read and worth a look.