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

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Dr. Lisa Moore shows us several ways:

Understand the gravity of the situation

Jumping is great to keep your bones healthy, strong, and dense!

Jumping is not so great if you already have osteoporosis, as you are much more likely to break something.

So, what to do?

First, understand the mechanics and physiology of why jumping works: impact improves bone density by increasing ground reaction forces—when your body pushes into the ground and the ground pushes back, making it stronger, in accordance with Woolf’s Law (the bone of a healthy animal adapts to the loads placed on it).

This is because bone is living tissue and when a bone experiences regular, appropriately applied loading—such as compression, tension, or shear—it responds by becoming denser and stronger in the areas where that stress occurs.

Conversely, when loading is reduced or absent, bone tissue is gradually reabsorbed, and the bone becomes weaker.

This is why weight-bearing, resistance, and impact-style forces are particularly effective for improving bone density, while non–weight-bearing activity has much less effect on skeletal strength.

Note: you will need a certain baseline amount of strength to be able to do this. So if you don’t work up to it slowly first.

Squats that will work:

• Squats with speed: a slow bodyweight squat produces the force associated with about 1x bodyweight, while performing the same squat more explosively can raise ground reaction forces to 2–3x that of bodyweight, without jumping, as you accelerate due to gravity on the way down, and then you push downwards again, powerfully pushing the entire planet away, because that’s how strong you are.
  • It sounds silly like that, but as we know from Newton, these forces are equal and opposite!
• Squats with speed and load: holding weight during strength or power exercises further increases ground reaction forces, providing more bone stimulus while remaining controlled, so that’s the progression to aim for here.

Step-ups are great too; here are some considerations to get the most out of them:

• Step height matters: step-ups create higher gravitational potential energy (and thus greater force when that energy is used on the way down) as the step gets higher, with lateral and forward step-ups offering different force levels while still being lower risk than jumping. On which note…
• Lateral stepovers: lateral step-based movements combine power and speed to raise ground reaction forces in a way that often feels safer and more comfortable than traditional impact, and again, Woolf’s Law is quite specific about this—bones strengthen in the exact regions and directions that forces are applied. So if you only train in one direction, your bone will only be strong in one direction, which means it’ll break easily if a force is applied in a different direction (say, you slip and fall sideways).
• Weighted step-ups: adding weight to step-ups also increases the force, of course.

As for which to focus on increasing (safely, please) you probably remember from school that force = mass x acceleration, so increasing either the mass or the acceleration will give benefits.

For more on all of this plus some notes about heel stomps vs heel drops, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Osteoporosis & Exercises: Which To Do (And Which To Avoid)

Take care!