Greetings all. It’s another snowy day and schools are closed, so hopefully if you’re home with your kids, they’re outside playing in the snow.
To follow up on the last couple of blog posts about diet and detecting Alzheimer’s disease through retinal scanning, I’ve had a few questions: What can you do to prevent it? It’s a great question, and unfortunately we’re far from having all the answers. However, there are evidence-based steps we can take to lower the risk. I look at these things like investing money—if you start a little early, it can pay big dividends later in life when it really counts. If you have a family history of dementia (like I do), you become especially motivated to make choices that might help you avoid that path.
Here are some key steps worth prioritizing:
- Get enough sleep.
I can’t take credit for the quote (it escapes me whose it is), but I saw it in Dr. Matthew Walker’s excellent book on sleep, which I highly recommend: “The number of people who can get by on less than 7 hours of sleep—rounded to the nearest percent and expressed as a whole number—is zero.” We all need 7–9 hours per night. A couple of famous “short sleepers” were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both of whom developed dementia later in life. That’s not proof of causation, but being able to function on little sleep is nothing to brag about. - Keep your blood glucose and insulin levels in check.
This ties back to the good diet advice from a few weeks ago. Chronically elevated insulin levels increase dementia risk. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28255864
We’ve long known about the strong link between diabetes and increased dementia risk. I remember hearing as a fourth-year optometry student that some researchers were calling dementia “Type 3 diabetes” due to the association.
As a side note: you can have normal blood glucose but elevated insulin levels—this is often a precursor to type 2 diabetes. If you’re at risk, ask your doctor to check not only your blood glucose but your fasting insulin as well. - Stay active.
This doesn’t just mean doing a crossword puzzle once in a while. Stay physically and mentally engaged. Remain socially active with friends and family. Join a service club, get involved in your community, or take an adult class to learn new skills.
Ultimately, we don’t have all the answers for prevention or treatment yet. At this point, I believe we’d make more progress by focusing aggressively on prevention rather than waiting to cure the disease once it’s already developed.
That’s all for this week.
Dr. Jason
