Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Alzheimer’s is just one cause of dementia, but it’s a very notable one, not least of all because it’s

• a) the most common cause of dementia, and
• b) a measurably terminal disease.

For that reason we’re focusing on Alzheimer’s today, although most of the advice will go for avoiding dementia in general.

First, some things not everyone knows about Alzheimer’s:

• Alzheimer’s is a terminal disease.
• People who get a diagnosis at age 60 are typically given 4–8 years to live.
  • Some soldier on for as many as 20, but those are rare outliers.
• Alzheimer’s begins 20 years or more before other symptoms start to develop.
  • This makes this information very relevant for younger people approaching 40, for example.
• Alzheimer’s accounts for 60–80% of dementia, and affects around 6% of people over 60.
  • By the age of 65, that figure is 10%. By the age of 70, however, the percentage is still about the same—this is because of the mortality rate preventing the accumulation of Alzheimer’s patients over time.

Want to know more? Read: 2023 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts And Figures Special Report ← this is a very comprehensive downloadablereference, by the way, including a lot of information about diagnosis, treatmentpathways, and earlyinterventions.

Speaking of diagnosis…

Know what the symptoms are… and aren’t!

Forgetting your car keys can be frustrating. Forgetting them frequently can be worrying.

But: there’s a difference between forgetting your car keys, and forgetting what car keys are used for. The latter is the kind of memory loss that’s more of a red flag for Alzheimer’s.

Similarly: forgetting someone’s name can be embarrassing. Forgetting someone’s name, asking them, forgetting asking them, asking them again, forgetting again (lather rinse repeat) is more of a red flag for Alzheimer’s.

There are other symptoms too, some of them less commonly known:

❝Difficulty remembering recent conversations, names or events; apathy; and depression are often early symptoms. Communication problems, confusion, poor judgment and behavioral changes may occur next. Difficulty walking, speaking, and swallowing are common in the late stages of the disease❞

~ Alzheimer’s Association

If you or a loved one are experiencing worrying symptoms: when it comes to diagnosis and intervention, sooner is a lot better than later, so do talk to your doctor.

As for reducing your risk? First, the obvious stuff:

The usual 5 things that go for almost everything:

• Have a good diet—the Mediterranean Diet is once again recommended (we expect this will not be a surprise to regular readers!)
• Get regular exercise—in the case of avoiding Alzheimer’s and other dementias, typically the most important thing here is heart health, so getting regular cardiovascular exercise, such walking, running, or dancing is great. Cycling too. Swimming, not so much. Not that swimming’s bad or anything, it’s just that when your body is horizontal, the heart has less work to do, especially in the upper part of the body, because it’s not defying gravity. Similarly, yoga is great for the health but won’t particularly help with this, nor will weight training.
• Get good sleep—as we get older, we tend to need less sleep, and tend more towards the lower end of the standard “7–9 hours” prescription, but getting at least those 7 hours makes a huge difference.
• Cut down (or eliminate) alcohol consumption—and especially avoid binge-drinking. While “binge-drinking” is typically associated with young people, that Christmas party where that one uncle gets very drunk is also binge-drinking, for example. Plus, heavy drinking in early life has also been correlated with higher risk of Alzheimer’s later.
• Don’t smoke. It’s bad for everything, and Alzheimer’s risk is no exception.

How much do lifestyle changes alone make a difference?

They make a big difference. This 2022 population-based cohort study (so: huge sample size) looked at people who had 4–5 of the healthy lifestyle factors being studied, vs people who had 0–1 of them. They found:

❝A healthy lifestyle was associated with a longer life expectancy among men and women, and they lived a larger proportion of their remaining years without Alzheimer’s dementia.❞

The numbers of years involved by the way ranged between 3 and 20 years, in terms of life expectancy and years without or with Alzheimer’s, with the average increase of healthy life years being approximately the same as the average increase in years. This is important, because:

A lot of people think “well if I’m going to go senile, I might as well [unhealthy choice that shortens lifespan]”, but they misunderstand a critical factor:

The unhealthy choices will reduce their healthy life years, and simply bring the unhealthy ones (and subsequent death) sooner. If you’re going to spend your last few years in ill-health, it’s better to do so at 90 than 50.

The other thing you may already know… And a thing about it that not everyone considers:

Keeping cognitively active is important. This much is broadly known by the general public, and to clinicians, this was the fourth “healthy factor” in the list of five (instead of the sleep that we put there, because we were listing the 5 things that go for most preventable health issues).

Everyone leaps to mention sudoku at this point, so if that’s your thing, great, enjoy it! (This writer personally enjoys chess, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; if it yours though, you can come join her on Chess.com and we’ll keep sharp together)

But the more parts of your mental faculties you keep active, the better. Remember, brainpower (as with many things in health and life) is a matter of “use it or lose it” and this is on a “per skill” basis!

What this means: doing sudoku (a number-based puzzle game) or chess (great as it may be) won’t help as much for keeping your language skills intact, for example. Given that language skills are one of the most impactful and key faculties to get lost to Alzheimer’s disease, neglecting such would be quite an oversight!

Some good ways to keep your language skills tip-top:

• Read—but read something challenging, if possible. It doesn’t have to be Thomas Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other, but it should be more challenging than a tabloid, for example. In fact, on the topic of examples:
  • This newsletter is written to be easy to read, while not shying away from complex ideas or hard science. Our mission is literally to “make [well-sourced, science-based] health and productivity crazy simple”.
  • But the academic papers that we link? Those aren’t written to be easy to read. Go read them, or at least the abstracts (in academia, an abstract is essentially an up-front summary, and is usually the first thing you’ll see when you click a link to a study or such). Challenge yourself!
• Write—compared to reading/listening, producing language is a (related, but) somewhat separate skill. Just ask any foreign language learner which is more challenging: reading or writing!
  • Journaling is great, but writing for others is better (as then you’ll be forced to think more about it)
• Learn a foreign language—in this case, what matters it that you’re practicing and learning, so in the scale of easy or hard, or doesn’t matter if it’s Esperanto or Chinese. Duolingo is a great free resource that we recommend for this, and they have a wide range of extensive courses these days.

Now for the least obvious things…

Social contact is important.

Especially in older age, it’s easy to find oneself with fewer remaining friends and family, and getting out and about can be harder for everyone. Whatever our personal inclinations (some people being more introverted or less social than others), we are fundamentally a social species, and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have built us around the idea that we will live our lives alongside others of our kind. And when we don’t, we don’t do as well.

See for example: Associations of Social Isolation and Loneliness With Later Dementia

If you can’t get out and about easily:

• Online socialising is still socializing.
• Online community is still community.
• Online conversations between friends are still conversations between friends.

If you don’t have much (or anyone) in the category of friends and family, join Facebook groups related to your interests, for example.

Berries are surprisingly good

^This may read like a headline from 200,000 BCE, but it’s relevant here!

Particularly recommended are:

• blueberries
• blackberries
• raspberries
• strawberries
• cranberries

We know that many of these berries seem to have a shelf-life of something like 30 minutes from time of purchase, but… Frozen and dried are perfectly good nutritionally, and in many cases, even better nutritionally than fresh.

Read: Effect of berry-based supplements and foods on cognitive function: a systematic review

Turmeric’s health benefits appear to include protecting against Alzheimer’s

Again, this is about risk reduction, and turmeric (also called curcumin, which is not the same as cumin) significantly reduces the build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain. Amyloid plaques are part of the progression of Alzheimer’s.

See for yourself: Protective Effects of Indian Spice Curcumin Against Amyloid Beta in Alzheimer’s Disease

If you don’t like it as a spice (and even if you do, you probably don’t want to put it in your food every day), you can easily get it as a supplement in capsule form.

Lower your homocysteine levels

Lower our what now? Homocysteine is an amino acid used for making certain proteins, and it’s a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.

Foods high in folate (and possible other B-vitamins) seem to lower homocysteine levels. Top choices include:

• Leafy greens
• Cruciferous vegetables
• Tomatoes

Get plenty of lutein

We did a main feature about specifically this a little while ago, so we’ll not repeat our work here, but lutein is found in, well, the same things we just listed above, and lower levels of lutein are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not a proven causative factor—we don’t know entirely what causes Alzheimer’s, just a lot of factors that have a high enough correlation that it’d be remiss to ignore them.

Catch up on our previous article: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It