Question

1. What are the effects of aging on sensory function?

2. What can be done to prevent vision and hearing losses with aging?

3. What are the 5 sensory systems?

Answer 1

Answers

Q:-1. What are the effects of aging on sensory function?

our sensory functions include sence of smell,hearing,touch or skin ,taste and vision. As aging affects all the systems as we grow older even our organs gets older lossing there functions slowly.Your senses become less sharp, and this can make it harder for you to notice details. Sensory changes can affect your lifestyle.

Hearing and vision is the sensory function which is most commonly affected as the age progress Devices such as glasses and hearing aids, or lifestyle changes can improve your ability to hear and see.

These may affect in communicating, enjoying activities, and staying involved with people. Sensory changes can even lead to isolation.

The stimulus or the sensations from external enivironment like touch ,smell etc reaches the brain and then the sensation is felt by us .A certain amount of stimulation is required before you become aware of a sensation. This minimum level of sensation is called the threshold. Aging raises this threshold. You need more stimulation to be aware of the sensation.

TASTE AND SMELL

The senses of taste and smell work together. Most tastes are linked with odors. The sense of smell begins at the nerve endings high in the lining of the nose.

You have about thousands of taste buds. Your taste buds sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter flavours as the age increases even the taste buds sheads and they won't feel the taste better and the each remaining taste bud also begins to shrink. In addition, your mouth produces less saliva as you age. This can cause dry mouth, which can affect your sense of taste.

Your sense of smell can also diminish, especially after age 70. This may be related to a loss of nerve endings and less mucus production in the nose.

Certain things can speed up the loss of taste and smell. These include diseases, smoking, and exposure to harmful particles in the air.

TOUCH/SKIN

The sense of touch makes you aware of pain, temperature, pressure, vibration, and body position.

With aging, sensations may be reduced or changed. These changes can occur because of decreased blood flow to the nerve endings or to the spinal cord or brain. The spinal cord transmits nerve signals and the brain interprets these signals.

Health problems, such as a lack of certain nutrients, can also cause sensation changes. Brain surgery, problems in the brain, confusion, and nerve damage from injury or long-term (chronic) diseases such as diabetes can also result in sensation changes.

Some may not feel the touch which some feels sensitive to light touch too.

Q:-2. What can be done to prevent vision and hearing losses with aging?

We cant prevent aging because it is the natural process that occurring to our body as we know the time passed cannot be retaken and its same like as the time goes our age and our organ age also increases.

Anyways there are few methods we could do to slow down the aging process but still must be clear that aging is not preventable and its not a disease too and is the normal physiology of the body.

As age progress you may have problem with hearing and the only solution for that is to keep hearing aids .and to delay this aging changes its better to cut down the use of earphones with high volume which could damage the ear and also preffering a low volume anywhere could preserve the hearing ability a bit more.

Coming to the vision loss even this change is mostly seen as the age progress and in such cases also the changes can be delayed by having good vegetables and fruits containing retinoids and vitamin A in the diet.

Q:-3. What are the 5 sensory systems?

• Visual or Optic or sence of vision
• Auditory or sence of hearing
• Olfactory (smell) System.
• Gustatory (taste) System.
• Tactile System or touch or somatic sensation