Word: dementiaism
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Several studies have found that folks who regularly engage in mentally challenging activities?like reading, doing crossword puzzles or playing chess?seem less likely to develop dementia later in life. The difficulty comes in figuring out whether their good fortune is a direct result of their leisure activities or whether their continuing pursuit of those pleasures merely reflects good genes for cognitive function...
...year survey of 469 elderly people living in the Bronx, N.Y., tried to get to the bottom of this chicken-or-egg question by following subjects who had no signs of dementia in the first seven years of the study. The results, which were published in 2003, showed that reading and playing board games or a musical instrument was associated with a decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. Intriguingly, those with the strongest habits demonstrated the greatest benefits. Participants who solved crossword puzzles four days a week, for instance, had a 47% lower risk...
...same token, several studies have suggested that older folks who are socially active?who, for example, do volunteer work or attend religious services?have a reduced risk of dementia. There are, of course, plenty of caveats that go along with those observations, including the same old chicken-or-egg problem that haunts all observational studies: In this case, is withdrawal from society a cause or result of Alzheimer's disease...
...Alzheimer's Association. "Let's say you're dialed in to get Alzheimer's disease at 82. You may be able to push that back until maybe you're 92." Depending on where their personal thermostat is set, some people will do everything right and still develop dementia in their 50s. Others will do everything wrong and be perfectly lucid at 101. Most of the rest of us will fall somewhere between those two extremes. For now, at least, preventing dementia is still a numbers game, but one in which we're starting to grasp the variables...
...judgment, promote learning and concentration, boost mood, speed reaction time and sharpen problem solving and accuracy. According to Sonia Ancoli-Israel, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego who has done extensive studies in the aging population, lack of sleep may even mimic the symptoms of dementia. In recent preliminary findings, she was able to improve cognitive function in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's simply by treating their underlying sleep disorder. "The need for sleep does not change a lot with age," says Ancoli-Israel, but often because of disruptive illnesses and the medications used...