14 Powerful Strategies To Prevent Dementia

Dementia risk starts climbing very steeply after the age of 65, but it’s not entirely predetermined. Dr. Brad Stanfield, a primary care physician, has insights:

The strategies

We’ll not keep them a mystery; they are:

• Cognitive stimulation: which means genuinely challenging mental activities using a variety of mental faculties. This will usually mean that anything that is just “same old, same old” all the time will stop giving benefits after a short while once it becomes rote, and you’ll need something harder and/or different.
• Hearing health: being unable to participate in conversations increases dementia risk; hearing aids can help.
• Eyesight health: similar to the above; regular eye tests are good, and the use of glasses where appropriate.
• Depression management: midlife depression is linked to later life dementia, likely in large part due to social isolation and a lack of stimulation, but either way, treating depression earlier reduces later dementia risk.
• Exercising regularly: what’s good for the heart is good for the brain; the brain is a hungry organ and the blood is what feeds it (and removes things that shouldn’t be there)
• Head injury avoidance: even mild head injuries can cause problems down the road. Protecting one’s head in sports, and even while casually cycling, is important.
• Smoking cessation: just don’t smoke; if you smoke, make it a top priority to quit unless you are given direct strong medical advice to the contrary (there are cases, few and far between, whereby quitting smoking genuinely needs to be deferred until after something else is dealt with first, but they are a lot rarer than a lot of people who are simply afraid of quitting would like to believe)
• Cholesterol management: again, healthy blood means a healthy brain, and that goes for triglycerides too.
• Weight management: obesity, especially waist to hip ratio (indicating visceral abdominal fat specifically) is associated with many woes, including dementia.
• Diabetes management: once again, healthy blood means a healthy brain, and that goes for blood sugar management too.
• Blood pressure management: guess what, healthy blood still means a healthy brain, and that goes for blood pressure too.
• Alcohol reduction/cessation: alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, and for most people who drink, quitting is probably the top thing to do after quitting smoking.
• Social engagement: while we all may have our different preferences on a scale of introversion to extroversion, we are fundamentally a social species and thrive best with social contact, even if it’s just a few people.
• Air pollution reduction: avoiding pollutants, and filtering the air we breathe where pollutants are otherwise unavoidable, makes a measurable difference to brain health outcomes.

For more information on all of these (except the last two, which really he only mentions in passing), enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← our own main feature on the topic

Take care!