Word: dementia
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...your mind, and nothing threatens your well-being so much as the feeling that it's at risk. What's more, while most memory loss is normal, at least some people must be part of the unlucky minority that develops Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia...
Meanwhile, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who have been following over 1,500 people for more than 35 years found a significantly lower rate of dementia, including Alzheimer's, in those who exercised. Another study, this one of 2,000 elderly men living in Hawaii, showed that those who walked two miles or more a day were half as likely to develop dementia as those who walked a quarter-mile or less...
When it comes to keeping your brain healthy - and working at its best - doctors have long advised patients to "use it or lose it." The idea is to keep the intellectual highways humming; if circuits aren't used, they tend to deteriorate and eventually wither away, leading to dementia, and in some cases,Alzheimer's. But new research provides a twist on this familiar advice - it turns out that some people benefit more from using it than others...
That means that those with the lowest cognitive abilities are most likely to lose it if they don't use it, and also most likely to protect themselves from dementia and other cognitive problems by keeping their brain circuits active. Not surprisingly, the jobs that proved most beneficial to these folks include the higher degree professions such as law, medicine and journalism, but any career that required multi-tasking, organizing and managerial skill also boosted cognitive abilities later in life. "Any job that requires you to keep fresh, whether it is new sales techniques or learning about new products...
...study reinforces previous studies' findings about the importance of keeping brain circuits active, it is the first to tie it to the subjects' baseline intellectual ability. In other studies, researchers could never be sure, for instance, that people who remained intellectually active and therefore suffered fewer cases of dementia, didn't have some sort of brain reserve, or start out with a higher level of cognitive ability that served as a buffer during their declining years...