FYI. I'm not a brain expert so I'm not directly following these.
I'm going to be doing my own thing, which you shouldn't do since I'm not medically trained.
Dementia prevention 19 ways per Dean.
Put down that brain teaser you torture yourself with and get your hearing tested. If you are interested in preserving brain function as you age, some of the clearest benefits come from staying socially connected, scientists have found.
That means getting a hearing aid if you can’t hear what people around you are saying. People with untreated hearing loss have a 90% higher rate of dementia than others in their age group, according to the 2020 report of the Lancet commission on dementia prevention, intervention, and care.
As America grays, seniors are looking for answers to make sure their cognitive abilities don’t expire before they do. They are told they should eat a Mediterranean diet. Get enough sleep. Avoid stress. Walk 10,000 steps a day. Lose weight.
Which one of those things actually helps? Probably all of them. Barron’s has been talking to brain scientists to learn what the research tells us about maintaining brain function. There is no one thing that protects against dementia, they tell us.
“It’s everything,” says cognitive neuroscientist Denise Park, who runs the Park Aging Brain Laboratory at the University of Texas at Dallas. “There are hundreds of skills that people possess, and you lose a lot of them if you don’t just interact with other people but with your environment.”
Park, 71 herself, makes a conscious effort to keep her brain working all the time. “Even when I wait in line, I pull out my phone and play computer games,” she says. “I never have an idle moment ever.”
Little wonder that so many seniors are obsessed with avoiding dementia. Brain health is key for both happiness in retirement and, to a large degree, financial security. “There is real evidence that people over 50 worry the most about dementia and beginning to lose their memory,” says Gill Livingston, the University College London psychiatry professor who led the Lancet commission on dementia. “It’s financial but it’s also very individual.”
Asked what she does to protect her own brain, Livingston replied that she lifts weights, tries to walk 10,000 steps a day, drinks moderately and watches her blood pressure. The 63-year-old also had her hearing tested, found hearing loss that she wasn’t aware of, and now uses hearing aids.
The modern world places a premium on remaining lucid. The advent of 401(k) savings plans over the past 40 years has transformed all of us into our own pension plan managers. Whereas our parents and grandparents simply waited for the pension check to arrive each month, now we must make complex investing decisions on our own.
Brain health is also a key for delaying—or avoiding altogether—the need for a nursing home, which can help preserve a retirement nest egg. William Bernstein, a former neurologist who became a financial author and money manager, says some mental slowing is inevitable as we age. He recommends simplifying your finances and going over your investment strategy with your children so they can take over if need be.
“There’s a good chance you won’t be as cognitively intact and you ought to make provisions for that,” says Bernstein.
The Lancet Commission combined research around the world with its own research and found 12 modifiable risk factors that in aggregate account for 40% of dementias. Some are behaviors or conditions long associated with health problems such as smoking, heavy drinking, or diabetes.
Others are more surprising. It turns out higher education levels early in life appear to protect against dementia later in life, research found. Working helps protect against dementia by keeping our brains engaged, scientists observed. The Lancet report noted that countries with lower retirement ages had higher dementia rates.
Why might education and work be protective? Livingston of the Lancet Commission says challenging intellectual activity creates a brain with denser connections that allow it to keep functioning even with the inevitable deterioration that comes with age or disease. This capacity was called “cognitive reserve” in this paper by neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern of Columbia University. “If you have cognitive reserve, you are more likely to survive without developing dementia,” Livingston explains. “We think education in itself strengthens the brain. It makes it more resilient.”
Controlling hypertension is another key in protecting your brain. High blood pressure can cause tears in the white matter of the brain over time, says Park, the UT Dallas neuroscientist. “If you get enough of those tears, you will have trouble transferring signals to the cortex of the brain,” she says. In essence, your brain will work less well.
Arterial disease also puts you at greater risk of stroke. “You can have a large number of smaller strokes, some of which you’re not even aware of and the cumulative effect is substantial cognitive decline that impairs your daily life,” said Thad Polk, a University of Michigan professor and cognitive neuroscientist who wrote “The Aging Brain” for The Great Courses.
The Lancet Commission found that middle-aged people who have systolic blood pressure more than 130 have a 60% greater chance of developing dementia down the road.
“What is good for your heart is good for your brain,” says Polk. He says numerous studies have found that exercise is one of the best things you can do to protect your brain.
But when it comes to the brain, physical health factors aren’t the entire story. A number of studies found that people who care for someone with dementia are more likely to get dementia themselves. Why? The answer appears to be that the stress of caring for someone alters their brains in ways that make it more vulnerable to dementia.
Zachary Cordner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, has run tests on mice where he purposely stressed the rodents and found their brains changed. Mice, like humans, are normally social creatures. In one experiment, researchers would isolate a mouse all day to impose one sort of stress, and then expose it to an aggressive “bully” mouse to oppose another type of stress.
When they examined the mice’s brains, they found changes in the regions of the brain involved in learning and memory as well as mood, anxiety, and social interactions.“ It’s clear these chronic stress exposures alter the stress system in the brain,” Cordner says.
As the human brain ages, it changes. Research has found that an older brain processes information more slowly. Seniors often have declining episodic memory, which is why they have more trouble remembering where they put the keys. (Although the 66-year-old reporter writing this article can attest he had trouble remembering where he put them even when young.) Older people have more trouble mastering large bodies of new facts, even as they may remember a familiar set of facts in sharp detail.
None of this mean our brains stop working. To the contrary, an older person with a specialized skill or knowledge set may retain that to the end of their days. What their brain loses in processing power may be offset by increased experience in the world.
And what about those brain teasers mentioned at the beginning of this article? “The issue with brain games is there is good evidence you will improve at the brain games,” says Polk of the University of Michigan. “There’s not good evidence that will generalize to other areas of cognition.”
He goes on: “There is nothing wrong with playing these games. But there might be better ways to spend your time if your goal is brain health.”
Write to Neal Templin at neal.templin@barrons.com
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