Keeping your marbles – Steps to Prevent Dementia

Steps to Prevent Dementia

What are you doing to prevent dementia? Yes, you can reduce your risk!

An influential report, the Lancet Commission Report of Dementia Prevention,  updated in 2024, details 14 risk-reducing steps. I have 3 steps to add to that list.

Why bother?

Dementia is a big problem that you don’t want to get:

• It affects a large number of people, and it is devastating. Over age 65, there are 1 in 14 people with dementia, and for over 80’s it rises to 1 in 6. 
• Women are twice as likely to suffer.
• Dementia is currently the most important contributor to death in the United Kingdom, ahead of heart disease and stroke.

What do you need to do?

Tackle the problems: these 17 risk factors are all modifiable and allow you to reduce your risk of dementia by at least 50%, and at the minimum, delay the onset. Worth doing, don't you think? Addressing some personal weaknesses, keeping slim and active with all your health issues under optimum control will make the difference.

 

The risk factors fall into 5 groups, 4 you can work on ie poisons, social isolation, lifestyle medical issues, major medical metabolic problems, and the public health issues that are less controllable. The additional steps are taking HRT/TRT, perfect oral hygiene and shingles control.

Dementia Prevention

You are aware of the curse of dementia [mainly as Alzheimer’s Disease – AD] either as a risk of ageing or more powerfully because of personal experience of a sufferer.

There IS an inherited ie genetic component related principally to the APOE e4 gene. But lots of people who have the gene don’t get AD. The important information is not whether you have the gene [so don’t rush to get a test] but whether the gene is switched on - this is called gene expression.

Reducing Cardiovascular Risk – Statins

Maximum prevention of cardiovascular disease [CVD] – the safety and usefulness of statins

This matters because CVD is a major killer: both cardiovascular death or hospitalisation [Major Adverse Cardiovascular Events = MACE] are almost entirely preventable by lowering blood pressure <120/80, avoiding smoking, and reducing apolipoprotein B concentration [ApoB-‘bad cholesterol’ most of which is LDL-C – this being what is usually measured]. Few if any of you will be smokers in 2023, but many of you have non-optimal BP [see previous InfoSheet on this] and less than perfect cholesterol patterns.

How to MAXIMISE your healthspan and have a Diamond Life

Your Diamond Life

Not in the sense being rich materially, but rich in good 'quality of life' years. So your HealthSpan is the good years, your LifeSpan the total including those bad end-of-life years you have seen others have.

Want help you to limit the effects of ageing and maximise your HealthSpan?