Category: Dementia

Some signs of the vitamin deficiency include include poor sleep, symptoms of depression, headaches, weak muscles and tiredness.

Vitamin D deficiency increases the risk of dementia, research finds.

Adequate levels of vitamin D could prevent almost one-in-five cases of dementia from occurring, the study estimates.

People with low levels of vitamin D have lower brain volumes and are also at a higher risk of strokes — a condition in which the blood supply is cut off to part of the brain.

Professor Elina Hyppönen, study co-author, said:

“Vitamin D is a hormone precursor that is increasingly recognised for widespread effects, including on brain health, but until now it has been very difficult to examine what would happen if we were able to prevent vitamin D deficiency.”

Researchers examined data from almost 300,000 people in the UK Biobank study.

A genetic analysis of the data suggested that low levels of vitamin D are causing the increase in dementia risk.

Professor Hyppönen said:

“Our study is the first to examine the effect of very low levels of vitamin D on the risks of dementia and stroke, using robust genetic analyses among a large population.

In some contexts, where vitamin D deficiency is relatively common, our findings have important implications for dementia risks.

Indeed, in this UK population we observed that up to 17 per cent of dementia cases might have been avoided by boosting vitamin D levels to be within a normal range.”

Worldwide, vitamin D deficiency is very common.

Changing this could help to reduce the dementia risk for many, explained Professor Hyppönen:

“Dementia is a progressive and debilitating disease that can devastate individuals and families alike.

If we’re able to change this reality through ensuring that none of us is severely vitamin D deficient, it would also have further benefits and we could change the health and wellbeing for thousands.

Most of us are likely to be ok, but for anyone who for whatever reason may not receive enough vitamin D from the sun, modifications to diet may not be enough, and supplementation may well be needed.”

How to correct a vitamin D deficiency

Around one-in-five people are thought to have a vitamin D deficiency.

Some signs of vitamin D deficiency include include poor sleep, symptoms of depression, headaches, weak muscles and tiredness.

A deficiency in this vitamin is particularly prevalent among people with darker skin, who do not leave the house or who are pregnant or have problems with absorption.

Vitamin D supplementation is one option for correcting the problem.

Around 10 mcg per day is the dose often recommended.

A change of diet can also help the problem.

Vitamin D is particularly abundant in foods like milk, liver, fatty fish, and egg yolks.

The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Navale et al., 2022).

Brain regions responsible for cognition were 14 percent larger in those who ate fish cooked with this method.

Eating both baked and broiled fish once a week protects the brain from loosing gray matter with age, according to new research.

The findings found no link between eating fried fish and better brain health.

Dr Cyrus Raji, who led the study, explained:

“Baked or broiled fish contains higher levels of omega-3s than fried fish because the fatty acids are destroyed in the high heat of frying, so we took that into consideration…”

The data came from 260 people who had their brains scanned and who also provided information on what they had been eating.

They were all part of a 10-year study starting in 1989 which was originally designed to reveal the lifestyle factors important in cardiovascular health.

The study found that people who ate baked or broiled fish had, on average, 4.3% larger brain volumes in the areas responsible for memory and 14% larger volumes in areas responsible for cognition.

Professor James T. Becker, who co-authored the study, explained the results:

“Our study shows that people who ate a diet that included baked or broiled, but not fried, fish have larger brain volumes in regions associated with memory and cognition.

We did not find a relationship between omega-3 levels and these brain changes, which surprised us a little.

It led us to conclude that we were tapping into a more general set of lifestyle factors that were affecting brain health of which diet is just one part.”

Omega-3 fatty acids, which are also found in seeds, nuts and certain oils, have been repeatedly found to enhance brain health.

However, in this study there was no link between actual omega-3 levels in the body and changes in the brain.

Dr Becker said:

“This suggests that lifestyle factors, in this case eating fish, rather than biological factors contribute to structural changes in the brain.

A confluence of lifestyle factors likely are responsible for better brain health, and this reserve might prevent or delay cognitive problems that can develop later in life.”

The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (Raji et al., 2014).

It takes 20-30 years for the brain changes leading to Alzheimer’s to occur.

The very best lifestyle change a person can make in midlife to protect against cognitive decline later is taking more exercise.

The results come from a study of 387 women in Australia who were followed from 1992 when they were between 45 and 55-years-old.

They were followed for over 20 years.

The researchers recorded all sorts of lifestyle factors including:

• mood,
• smoking,
• marital and employment status,
• education,
• and diet.

Each person was given simple tests of memory, such as the ability to remember a list of ten unrelated items.

Dr Cassandra Szoeke, who led the study, said:

“We now know that brain changes associated with dementia take 20 to 30 years to develop.

The evolution of cognitive decline is slow and steady, so we needed to study people over a long time period.

We used a verbal memory test because that’s one of the first things to decline when you develop Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Out of all the lifestyle changes, the number one protective factor was exercise.

It didn’t matter what type — from walking the dog to climbing a mountain — exercise was the lifestyle factor that provided the greatest protective effect against memory loss.

Dr Szoeke said:

“The message from our study is very simple.

Do more physical activity, it doesn’t matter what, just move more and more often.

It helps your heart, your body and prevents obesity and diabetes and now we know it can help your brain.

It could even be something as simple as going for a walk, we weren’t restrictive in our study about what type.”

You should start as early as possible, Dr Szoeke said:

“We expected it was the healthy habits later in life that would make a difference but we were surprised to find that the effect of exercise was cumulative.

So every one of those 20 years mattered.

If you don’t start at 40, you could miss one or two decades of improvement to your cognition because every bit helps.

That said, even once you’re 50 you can make up for lost time.”

The study was published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry (Szoeke et al., 2016).

The five factors linked to healthier brain aging.

Staying in education or taking on a leadership role at work can help people keep their brains healthy for longer, research finds.

Doing challenging activities in mid-life, the study found, helps people fight off dementia later on.

Professor Linda Clare said:

“Losing mental ability is not inevitable in later life.

We know that we can all take action to increase our chances of maintaining our own mental health, through healthy living and engaging in stimulating activities.

It’s important that we understand how and why this occurs, so we can give people meaningful and effective measures to take control of living full and active lives into older age.

People who engage in stimulating activity which stretches the brain, challenging it to use different strategies that exercise a variety of networks, have higher ‘Cognitive reserve’.

This builds a buffer in the brain, making it more resilient.

It means signs of decline only become evident at a higher threshold of illness or decay than when this buffer is absent.”

The conclusions come from the study of 2,315 people over 65.

They found the following factors were linked to healthier brain aging:

• Moderate alcohol consumption (meaning not too much alcohol, not that teetotallers need to start drinking!).
• Mentally stimulating activity.
• Physical activity.
• Social activity.
• Healthy diet.

Professor Bob Woods, who co-authored the study, said:

“We found that people with a healthier lifestyle had better scores on tests of mental ability, and this was partly accounted for by their level of cognitive reserve.

Our results highlight the important of policies and measures that encourage older people to make changes in their diet, exercise more, and engage in more socially oriented and mentally stimulating activities.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS Medicine (Clare et al., 2017).

A steady decline? Experts question whether the human brain really slows down with age.

Linguistic experts argue that people’s brains do not slow down with age, but actually show the benefits of experience.

Tests that had previously been taken to show cognitive decline as people age, they maintain, are actually showing the effects of having more information to process.

While accepting that physiological diseases of old age clearly exist, they say that the usual cognitive changes associated with age are exactly what you’d expect as the brain gathers more experience.

Remembering names

As linguists, they decided to test their theory using words–specifically the number of words that a person learns across their lifetime.

They set up a computer simulation to model this.

As the simulation got ‘older’, it began to slow down as it learnt more words–exactly as people do with ageing.

The lead author of the study, Dr Michael Ramscar, explained it like this:

“Imagine someone who knows two people’s birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly.

Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can ‘only’ match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?”

It’s not that people are forgetting words with age, it’s that there are more words competing for attention.

People face a similar problem with names: as they age, they learn more names, so one name is harder to recall because it is competing with a larger pool of alternate names in memory.

On top of this, names have become varied.

The authors give the example that in the 1880s, when trying to recall a woman’s first-name, there were about 100 equally possible alternatives.

Due to the greater variety in first-names now, however, you’d be trying to choose between 2,000 likely alternatives.

Age and experience

Even better news for the ageing population, the linguists argue, is that older people are actually making better use of the extra information that comes with experience.

On some tests, related to learning pairs of works, older people do better as they have access to more words which have been learnt over a lifetime.

Biology

What, you might wonder, about all the neurobiological evidence that the brain’s cognitive powers decline with age?

Well, excepting real diseases like Alzheimer’s, scientists have only discovered that the brain changes with age, not that these changes are the cause of any cognitive decline.

It has only been assumed that neurobiological changes in the brain are related to cognitive declines, since these two were thought to be happening simultaneously.

Now that there are questions over whether cognitive declines are really there, these neurobiological changes may have to be reassessed.

Is cognitive decline a myth?

If cognitive decline with age really is a myth then, the authors worry, simply being told that your brain slows down with age is damaging.

That’s because when people are told they are getting more stupid, they behave as though this were true.

The authors conclude by saying:

“…population aging is seen as a problem because of the fear that older adults will be a burden on society; what is more likely is that the myth of cognitive decline is leading to an absurd waste of human potential and human capital.

It thus seems likely that an informed understanding of the cognitive costs and benefits of aging will benefit all society, not just its older members.”

The study was published in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science (Ramscar et al., 2014).