Word: dementia
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...suggesting that a crossword puzzle a day will keep senility at bay or that somehow it's your fault if your mental capacity fails. But given how quickly the average age of Americans is rising and how much the risk of dementia leaps with advancing years, finding anything that delays cognitive decline even a little would be of enormous value...
...wonder research looking for links between lifestyle and a healthier brain has been booming in recent years. Later this month the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia will publish a long-awaited report prepared for the National Institutes of Health that summarizes what scientists know and don't know about improving cognitive and emotional health in the elderly. And the fourth major study on the role of exercise will be published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the Center for Health Studies in Seattle (Pizzuto is one of the 1,740 participants...
...healthy cardiovascular system may even, to some extent, compensate for tiny defects in the brain. Doctors have long known that suffering one or more strokes, which interrupt the flow of blood to the brain, increases the likelihood of dementia. They assumed that Alzheimer's disease was a completely unrelated problem. In fact, a long-running study of a group of nuns who agreed to donate their brains when they died has found that isn't necessarily the case. About a third of the nuns whose brains at autopsy showed clear signs of the plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer...
That doesn't mean those women wouldn't eventually have developed dementia had they lived long enough. But the study suggested to a lot of physicians that good vascular health may make it easier for a brain with incipient Alzheimer's to work around the plaques and tangles in its midst...
...that you've got your body running along smoothly, are there any mental gymnastics you can do to keep dementia at bay? The evidence is provocative but not terribly compelling. There's no question that you can improve your ability to remember names or other bits of information by practicing memory tasks, just as practice will help you learn a new instrument or another language. A number of researchers have proposed that a lifetime of such efforts could allow you to build up a healthy cognitive reserve to offset the declines of old age, though the idea remains theoretical...