into. Hey, saving your brain by giving up bread and pasta isn’t a bad trade-off.
. .. Obviously, we don’t know what causes AD, but we’re getting there. Age is always listed as the most common risk factor (AD used to be called “senile dementia”), because aside from a genetic AD variant that hits younger adults, the longer you live, the greater your risk of AD. For the standard form of AD, if there is a familial component, it’s a weak association, which means that for most of us, the fact that our dads (mine, for example) or our moms (definitely not my mom, which I better tell you too before she lets me have a few what-fors) developed AD really doesn’t increase our own risk.
. .. An increasingly large body of research has concluded that in most of us, the risk for AD rises with the same risk factors as for other “inevitable” diseases of aging, most prominently heart disease, which are now known to be not nearly as inevitable as we used to think. Thus, it looks as if you can significantly allay your risk of AD if you stick to a healthy lifestyle (particularly in midlife, please note), by not smoking, doing regular exercise, and eating a healthy diet, and as all of you must surely know by now, I favour a Mediterranean-style diet that includes a large intake of fruits, veggies and legumes and which strongly favours fish over meat, although my variant of a Med-fed diet also includes chocolate and wine, in moderation only, of course.
. .. The other important advice to help lower the risk of AD is to build and maintain a healthy brain through the years because for no other organ is the maxim that “if you don’t use it, you lose it” more true than it is for the brain, no, guys, not even for that other much smaller organ that you probably first heard that maxim about.
. .. That starts with getting as much education as possible earlier in life and then doing all you can to keep your brain active as you age, particularly into your senior years, and it also includes maintaining healthy social networks, because people with more social contacts clearly use their brains much more than those who become socially isolated.
. .. Another promising area of prevention concerns the current flavour-de-jour for all progressive, degenerative diseases, namely lowering levels of inflammation. Thus, most experts now believe that inflammation plays a role in many chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, some cancers, and AD, too, and that lowering inflammatory protein levels (for |
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