- The best way to promote long-term cognitive health is by living a healthy lifestyle, according to a new study.
- The study, which examined, post mortem, brains of people up to the age of 90, found that most cases of dementia were linked to unhealthy lifestyles.
- Only 12% of cases were associated with amyloid plaques, long considered a cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
- Experts explain that the health of the brain is closely related to the health of the heart, as mini-strokes are often the drivers of non-Alzheimer’s dementia.
A new study offers fresh evidence that living a healthy lifestyle may help a person maintain their cognitive reserve, reducing their chances of developing dementia later in life.
The study involved 586 brain autopsies of people who had a mean age of 90.9 years at the time of death, and found that their lifestyle habits were more clearly linked to their chances of getting dementia than were amyloid plaques or abnormal blood flow in their brains.
For many years, the presence of beta-amyloid plaques, tau tangles, or other dementia-related brain pathologies in the brain post mortem have been associated with dementias — especially Alzheimer’s disease.
However, recent research, including this new study, has found that the presence of these features frequently occurs in people who do not have dementia.
Participants in this study had registered with RUSH University’s Memory and Aging Project. Individuals self-reported their lifestyle habits. They were asked whether they smoked, engaged in at least 150 minutes of physical activity each week, and limited their alcohol consumption.
The healthiest 40% of participants were considered low risk or “healthy.” This corresponded to a Mediterranean-MIND diet score of 7.5 or above and late-life cognitive health score higher than 3.2.
The researchers estimated that just 12% of cognition-related measurements were affected by amyloid plaques.
The study is published in
The study’s first author, Dr….
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