Big fucking whoopee.
Useless. We need to know what to do NOW to prevent Alzheimers.
How many cups of coffee should I be drinking?
Coffee May Lower Your Risk of Dementia Feb. 2013
Or is your doctor using one of these to prevent dementia?
1. The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline by Dale Bredesen
2. A Real Alzheimer's Prevention Program from The University of California
3. I'm a Brain Doctor, and This Is What I Do to Prevent Alzheimer's December 2018
4. Reversing the Alzheimer’s Catastrophe April 2007
The latest here:
Alzheimer's Changes Tied to Childhood Cognitive Experience
Slower rate of cognitive decline linked with early-life enrichment
This effect occurred partly through an association with lower levels of Alzheimer's pathology changes, reported Shahram Oveisgharan, MD, of Rush University in Chicago, and colleagues, in JAMA Neurology.
"The findings suggest that cognitive health in old age depends in part on cognitive development in early life," Oveisgharan told MedPage Today. "Intervention programs such as Head Start targeting disadvantaged youths can result not only in better school performance and better job opportunities, but also in healthier late-life cognition and cognitive resilience," he said.
"Notably, these effects were independent of late-life socioeconomic status and late-life reports of cognitive activity, suggesting the benefits of early-life cognitive enrichments go beyond long-term changes in lifestyle or behavior," observed Timothy Hohman, PhD, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, and Catherine Kaczorowski, PhD, of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, in an accompanying editorial.
"These findings carry important public health implications, suggesting that late-life cognitive decline can be modified through thoughtful and intentional changes to public policy addressing early-life enrichment, defined herein by socioeconomic status in early life, availability of cognitive resources at 12 years of age, participation in cognitively stimulating activities at 6 years of age, and to a lesser extent, early-life foreign language instruction," they added.
Physical and cognitive activities in midlife have been tied to less late-life cognitive decline in earlier research. Previous studies also have shown that mentally-stimulating late-life activities may help slow brain aging.
In this analysis, Oveisgharan and colleagues evaluated 813 autopsied brains from the Rush Memory and Aging Project to explore whether early-life experiences were associated with Alzheimer's pathology. Study participants had enrolled from 1997 to 2019; they were followed for an average of 7 years before death and had cognitive and clinical assessments annually. Mean age at death was 90 and 69% were women.
At baseline, participants reported four indicators of early-life cognitive experience that researchers used to build a composite measure: early-life socioeconomic status including parents' education level; availability of cognitive resources at age 12 based on home environment features like a newspaper subscription, encyclopedia, globe, or atlas; frequency of participating in cognitively stimulating activities including being read to at age 6; and early-life foreign language instruction to age 18.
The researchers derived a continuous global Alzheimer's pathology score from counts of diffuse plaques, neuritic plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles and used 19 neuropsychological tests to create a cognitive assessment measure.
After controlling for age at death, sex, and educational level, a higher level of early-life cognitive enrichment was tied to a lower global Alzheimer's pathology score (estimate -0.057±0.022, P=0.01), but not with any other dementia-related pathological changes.
Early cognitive enrichment also was associated with less cognitive decline (mean -0.13 units per year, range -1.74 to 0.85). An indirect effect through Alzheimer's pathological changes accounted for 20% of the association between early-life enrichment and late-life cognitive decline; 80% was a direct association, the researchers reported.
"In addition to increasing cognitive reserve and promoting better cognitive performance in late life, early-life cognitive enrichment also promotes what has recently been termed resistance to Alzheimer's disease neuropathology, in that it reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease neuropathology through an unidentified mechanism," Hohman and Kaczorowski noted.
"There may be a critical early-life period when cognitive enrichment has direct effects on future Alzheimer's disease neuropathology, in addition to the well-characterized cognitive benefits associated with a variety of similar measures of cognitive reserve," they added.
Participants in the study largely were women and white and results are not directly generalizable to the population, Oveisgharan and colleagues said. "Our childhood socioeconomic measure is unlikely to have fully captured the variability in early life socioeconomic circumstances," they acknowledged. Early-life data were captured retrospectively and subject to recall bias, and unmeasured confounders may have influenced results.
Last Updated June 30, 2020
Disclosures
The study was supported by the National Institute on Aging.
Researchers disclosed support from the NIH.
Editorialists disclosed support from the NIH and BrightFocus Foundation.
Researchers disclosed support from the NIH.
Editorialists disclosed support from the NIH and BrightFocus Foundation.
Primary Source
JAMA Neurology
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