Lifestyle changes can help reduce the risk of dementia

Dementia is the loss of cognitive functioning—thinking, remembering, and reasoning—and behavioral abilities to such an extent that it interferes with a person's daily life and activities. These functions include memory, language skills, visual perception, problem solving, self-management, and the ability to focus and pay attention. Some people with dementia cannot control their emotions, and their personalities may change. Dementia ranges in severity from the mildest stage, when it is just beginning to affect a person's functioning, to the most severe stage, when the person must depend completely on others for basic activities of living.

Signs and symptoms of dementia result when once-healthy neurons (nerve cells) in the brain stop working, lose connections with other brain cells, and die. While everyone loses some neurons as they age, people with dementia experience far greater loss.

While dementia is more common as people grow older (up to half of all people age 85 or older may have some form of dementia), it is not a normal part of aging. Many people live into their 90s and beyond without any signs of dementia. One type of dementia, frontotemporal disorders, is more common in middle-aged than older adults.

A healthy lifestyle is one which helps to keep and improve your health and well-being. There are many different things that you can do to live a healthy lifestyle, such as eating healthy, being physically active, maintaining a healthy weigh, and managing your stress. However, a healthy lifestyle isn’t just about healthy eating and exercise, it also about taking care of the “whole you” – your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. And, that means taking care of you from the inside out.

Even though there are many common ways to live a healthy lifestyle, actually doing it looks different for everyone, and means something different from one person to the next. Regardless of what you choose to do, living a healthy lifestyle is a key component to disease prevention, wellness, and longevity.

Below there are important things you can do for a start to live a healthy lifestyle:

- Drink more water.

- Get enough sleep.

- Meditate often.

- Exercise regularly.

- Eat more fruits and vegetables.

- Cut down on processed food.

- Breathe deeply on purpose.

- Go for brown carbs vs. white carbs.

- Cut down on oily and sugary food, soda and caffeine.

- Stop smoking and/or avoid passive smoking.

Nearly everyone can lower their risk of dementia, even if it runs in the family, by living a healthy lifestyle, research suggests.The study of nearly 200,000 people showed the risk fell by up to a third.

The team at the University of Exeter said the results were exciting, empowering and showed people were not doomed to get dementia.

The findings were revealed at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference.

The study followed 196,383 people from the age of 64 for about eight years. It analysed people's DNA to assess their genetic risk of developing the disease. The study showed there were 18 cases of dementia per 1,000 people if they were born with high risk genes and then led an unhealthy lifestyle. But that went down to 11 per 1,000 people during the study if those high-risk people had a healthy lifestyle.

The figures might seem small, but that is because your mid-60s are relatively young in terms of dementia. The researchers say cutting dementia rates by a third would have a profound impact in older age groups where the disease is more common.

Also, this type of research cannot definitively prove that lifestyle causes different risks of dementia. It simply spots patterns in the data. But the results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, fit with previous research and World Health Organization advice.

Sadly, you can live the life of a saint and still get the disease. Lifestyle just changes the odds. Just one healthy habit (and it didn’t matter which one) … just one… extended life expectancy by two years in men and women. Try changing your lifestyle tomorrow and see how it makes you feel better.