healthy brain

Want a healthy brain when you're older? Keep it busy now by learning a language, taking classes, and playing games with friends.

People who embrace lifelong learning tend to be protected from dementia.

RODALE NEWS, LENOX, MA—It's fairly easy to tell how fit your body is, but do you ever wonder if you have strong, healthy brain? We all worry about our memory occasionally—unexpectedly blanking on a name or a word we know perfectly well is a near-universal experience. But for people who are getting up in years, anxiety about remembering can become a source of tremendous concern. Most of the people who come to see me for memory evaluations are anxious about whether the memory slips they experience are normal for their age. They worry that forgetting directions to a familiar place, or details of a recent conversation, may be a sign of impending dementia. If one or both of their parents have suffered from dementia, their anxiety level may be especially high.

THE DETAILS: Often a patient's memory test results turn out to be normal, but he or she has noticed a decline. So we explore what may be causing the momentary lapses. The good news is that not only is it normal for us to worry about our memory, but there are many things we can do to protect it, too. Some of the common factors that affect short-term memory function are sleep deprivation, medication side effects, excessive alcohol use, anxiety, depression, stress, and multitasking. For people concerned about cognitive decline, I make recommendations for preventive lifestyle changes and activities that have been shown to strengthen short-term recall, reasoning, and speed of processing, the most important functions for continued independence.

There's a lot we don't know about dementia, defined as cognitive decline due to physical changes in the brain. But we do know that doing the things that support a healthy brain can have major payoffs, even for people with a strong family history of dementia. Some years ago I worked with one woman whose mother had died of Alzheimer’s disease, and who consequently had genetic testing to determine her own risk. When she was told that she had the worst possible genetic profile for the disease, she asked my medical colleagues and me to design a program that would improve her chances of staying healthy.

Since then, she has zealously followed an anti-inflammatory diet and supplementation—Alzheimer’s disease appears to be an inflammatory process—while exercising religiously, learning new physical and mental skills, and using Posit Science Brain Fitness software for specific cognitive training. She comes back every few years for testing, and she’s now in her 70s and doing exceptionally well. She’s a terrific example of how much power we have to modify the expression of our genes through our lifestyle choices.