To this day, Alzheimer’s disease continues to be one of the greatest challenges in medicine to understand why it occurs, to lead to better treatments. And although pharmacology is advancing in leaps and bounds to try to stop it, science makes it increasingly clear to us that lifestyle is our best weapon to prevent the disease. And we not only talk about the diet either physical exercisebut also of how the brain is ‘trained’ with writing or reading. Some activities that we are losing.
New evidence. A new study published in the prestigious magazine Neurology has pointed out that having “cognitive enrichment” throughout life can reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by 38% and delay the onset of the disease up to five years. Although here the question is how the brain can be enriched to avoid this devastating disease.
A protective shield. The study is based on a small sample of 1939 peoplewith an average age of 80 years and with 75% women, who did not have any type of dementia at the beginning of the experiment. From here they began to follow them for eight years with different annual evaluations to determine the degree of dementia they had.
But what exactly is “cognitive enrichment”? The team of researchers measured the exposure of these individuals to intellectually stimulating environments throughout their lives, which include such everyday and accessible habits as reading, writing, learning new languages, visiting museums or libraries, and having educational resources at home from childhood.
The results. Once all the data was analyzed and cross-referenced, it was possible to see that the people who had the greatest cognitive enrichment showed an incidence of Alzheimer’s of 21%. This is a figure that increases as less intellectual and cultural activity is seen, until reaching an incidence of 34% in those patients who are in the 10% range of cognitive enrichment.
Overall, the group with greater stimulation had a 38% lower risk of Alzheimer’s and a 36% lower risk of mild cognitive impairment.
Delaying the disease. Beyond the risk percentages, the most important thing is the delay in the onset of the disease. Here the study found that people with a highly stimulated mind delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s in about five yearsmanifesting on average at 94 years of age compared to 88 years of age in the group with less stimulation.
In the case of mild cognitive impairment, the “delay” achieved was even greater when the disease debuted at age 78 to age 85.
What is it due to? One of the most fascinating aspects of the work comes from analyzing different corpses to see what was happening in their own brains depending on the lifestyle they lived when they were alive. And here it was seen that cognitive enrichment did not prevent amyloid plaques from forming, which is one of the causes of Alzheimer’s.
What was seen here is that people who had kept their minds active with writing or reading showed much slower cognitive decline and better memory and thinking ability, even when their brains already showed the physical damage associated with dementia. It is as if the brain, having been trained and nurtured for decades, had built other pathways to continue functioning efficiently even though the main pathways began to collapse due to the ‘junk’ in the brain generated by the disease.
There are nuances. In this case we have focused on an observational study based, in part, on the memory of the patients’ own experiences, such as what they did fifty years ago. This shows an important association, but it is not a direct coincidence or indisputable by other studies.
However, the findings do not fall on deaf ears, but rather They add to a mountain of previous evidence which suggests that prior enrichment reduces the pathologies associated with Alzheimer’s. This makes science point to the recommendation of dedicate at least one hour a day to hobbies and reading can protect our brain.
Technology against us. It is a reality that today some activities such as handwriting have declined in favor of writing on a tablet or computer to take notes or write emails. This is also added to the fact that audiobooks are beginning to have a lot of weight in our daily lives, which means that we train our brain less and less to put on and read a good book.
In this way, keeping the brain busy with activities such as crossword puzzles, sudoku or any type of activity can be essential to stop diseases as devastating as this one.
Images | Thought Catalog
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