Neuro-science News. Internet source. Dementia.
Brought by Paul Goldfinger, MD, Dean of the Blogfinger Off-Shore School of Medicine in Ocean Grove, NJ
The Washington Post reports, “Diabetes, air pollution and alcohol consumption could be the biggest risk factors for dementia, a study has found.” The study from 4 countries looked at thousands of brain scans.
Investigators came to this conclusion after comparing “modifiable risk factors for dementia…and” studying “how these factors appear to affect certain brain regions that are already particularly vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.” This “research, based on brain scans of nearly 40,000 adults, between ages 44 and 82, in Britain was published…in Nature Communications.
More than 55 million people live with dementia around the world, and that figure is expected to increase to 153 million by 2050, according to the World Health Organization.
These vulnerable regions of the brain develop during adolescence and help the brain process and integrate “bits of information across different modalities, across different senses,” said an associate professor at the University of Oxford and co-author of the study. But “they’re the first ones to go when we start aging.”
From the Washington Post’s summary of the study:
Diabetes, air pollution and alcohol consumption each has an effect that is about twice as much as the other leading risk factors. The next major risk factors are sleep, weight, smoking and blood pressure.Diabetes and alcohol consumption “have been consistently shown to be associated with both cerebral and cognitive decline,” the researchers wrote in the Nature Communications study. And there is growing evidence that exposure to air pollution is a risk factor for cognitive decline and dementia.
A 2020 Lancet report on dementia found that a dozen modifiable risk factors such as hypertension, hearing impairment, smoking and obesity together account for up to 40 percent of dementia cases worldwide.A person’s age, genes, family history, a traumatic brain injury or a stroke also are potential risk factors.
The study said social and physical activity— talking with friends and exercising — “make a huge difference.” And stimulating experiences, walking outside, “seeing different things” can be beneficial, she said.
Hearing loss which is more likely as a person ages, can take away opportunities for conversations that lead to “rapid brain stimulation,” Livingston said.
“And if you smoke, stop,” she said.