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Boost Your Brain Health and Fight off Alzheimer’s – Why Dementia Hits This Gender Worse
At any given time, two-thirds of all dementia patients are of just one gender.
This is a widely established fact.
But why is this gender so much worse hit by dementia than the other? That’s the subject of a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
It was once believed that more women suffer from dementia than men simply because women tend to reach higher ages than men by the time they die. But researchers at the University of Michigan have started to question whether there is more to this imbalance—especially considering that women make up a staggering two-thirds of dementia patients at any given time.
To solve the mystery, the researchers obtained information first collected in several large population-wide studies, including the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study, the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study, the Cardiovascular Health Study, the Framingham Offspring Study, and the Northern Manhattan Study.
Only people who reported black or white racial identities were included in the study because the research samples did not include enough people of other races to reach definite conclusions about them. This left the researchers with a sample of 26,088 people: 11,775 men and 14,313 women.
These subjects were tested on their global cognition (the ability to learn and understand concepts), executive function (a person’s control over their behavior and decisions), and memory when they were 58 years old and then repeatedly assessed on the same characteristics over the next eight years in order to record their rate of neurological decline.
At the beginning, women tested higher on all three dimensions: 2.20 points higher for global cognition, 2.13 points higher for executive function, and 1.89 points higher for memory.
But while men and women suffered approximately the same rate of decline in memory, women’s global cognition declined by 0.07 points per year faster than that of men, and their executive function by 0.06 points per year faster.
So, what can one conclude from these findings?
The most common conclusion is that women have a higher cognitive reserve than men. Cognitive reserve is the brain’s ability to compensate for neural damage by using alternative strategies to complete cognitive tasks that were once completed in conventional ways. People with higher education levels have also been found to have higher cognitive reserve.
In the 1980s, scientists found through autopsies that many people with no symptoms of dementia had brain damage similar to that seen in people with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. They concluded from this that, while all people’s brains seem to suffer similar damage, some are better at compensating for that damage.
At first glance this seems like a positive finding, but its downside can be seen among women in this latest study. Women start with a higher cognitive reserve, but once this is depleted, their decline in cognition is faster than that of men with lower cognitive reserve.
In other words, women probably develop dementia at the same age that men do, but the disease goes undiagnosed because women’s high cognitive reserve enables them to continue performing well on cognitive tests.
Delayed diagnoses of dementia result in delayed—and therefore less effective—treatment for women. This is the increased dementia risk that women face.
In response to this, the researchers propose developing more sensitive cognitive tools to enable an earlier diagnosis of dementia in women.
Boost Your Brain Health and Fight off Alzheimer’s – This Diet Prevents Alzheimer’s (But Don’t Cheat)
There is one type of diet that has been proven over and over again to prevent or even reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
But it may not always be the easiest diet to follow.
So scientists from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago decided to research how much could you cheat on this diet before it became ineffective in fighting Alzheimer’s.
The researchers used data obtained by the Chicago Health and Aging Project, an assessment of the cognitive health of elderly Chicago residents, from 1993 and 2012.
For this study, they included data from 5,001 people older than 65 who had completed a cognitive assessment questionnaire that tested their basic information processing skills and memory every three years.
In addition, the participants completed a questionnaire that recorded how often they consumed 144 different types of food.
From these food lists, the researchers assigned each participant a Mediterranean diet and a Western diet score. They then used the Western diet score to subtract points from the Mediterranean diet score to calculate the participants’ final Mediterranean diet score.
In other words, since there were 55 points up for grabs, a score of 55 meant the participant consumed a perfect Mediterranean diet. A score of 37 meant that two-thirds of their consumption was Mediterranean, 27 meant that they consumed half Mediterranean and half Western, and so forth.
By the end of all these calculations, the scientists discovered that those with the highest Mediterranean diet score were the equivalent of 5.8 years younger in cognitive functioning than those with the lowest scores.
Those who mixed the most Western foods with Mediterranean foods did not benefit from the Mediterranean diet at all.
This means that refraining from mixing Western foods with Mediterranean foods can extend your cognitively productive life by almost six years.
The researchers classified fruit, vegetables, legumes, olive oil, nuts, fish, potatoes, whole grains, and moderate wine consumption as Mediterranean. They classified fried foods, sweets, red meat, processed meat, full-cream dairy, refined grains, pies, and pizzas as Western.
Boost Your Brain Health and Fight off Alzheimer’s – The Dementia and Heart Health Connection
Brain and heart health are closely linked, which is hardly surprising considering all the blood vessels that supply blood to the billions of cells in the brain.
But a new long-term study that just appeared in PLOS Medicine reveals a very interesting angle to this connection.
It shows how you can avoid or even reverse dementia by treating your heart in this specific way.
Finnish and Swedish scientists collaborated on this study, using data first collected for the Finnish Cardiovascular Risk Factors, Aging, and Dementia study.
This large study followed 1,449 participants from 1972 to 1987, when they were in their middle ages, with an average age of 50.4 years. They were observed until 1998, when they reached old age.
A further 744 dementia-free subjects were followed further into their senior years, up to 2008.
The researchers rated the subjects on a modified version of the American Heart Association’s recommendations of three behavioral factors (smoking status, physical activity, and body mass index) and three biological factors (fasting blood sugar, total cholesterol, and blood pressure). They labeled the participants as poor, intermediate, and ideal on these factors.
This yielded the categories poor, intermediate, and ideal for middle ages only, along with the category’s poor, intermediate, and ideal for both middle ages and old age.
Sixty-one people had developed dementia by the first follow-up, with another 47 developing dementia by the second follow-up, giving the researchers plenty of data to work with.
Compared to the subjects who scored as poor on the heart health measures during middle age, those in the intermediate category had a 29% lower risk for dementia; those in the ideal category had a 48% lower risk.
Compared to those in the poor category during both middle and old age, those in the intermediate category during both of these periods cut their risk by 75%; those in the ideal category had an 86% lower risk.
This shows why you need to work on your heart health throughout your life and—while it is recommended that you try to keep your heart health at ideal levels—even moderate levels throughout your life can cut your dementia risk by 75%.
Watch this video to learn how to boost your brain health and fight off Alzheimer’s – Alzheimer’s Prevention Program: Keep Your Brain Healthy for the Rest of Your Life
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