Act in midlife to help prevent dementia

HOW healthy you are in midlife has emerged as one of the strongest predictors of whether you will develop dementia in old age.

New Melbourne research has found reducing blood pressure and cholesterol in your 40s, not smoking and maintaining a healthy weight have the biggest impact on later brain health.

Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health researchers found improving the health of our vascular system in midlife was ideal to preserve cognitive decline.

Vascular dementia is the second most common cause of dementia after Alzheimer’s, accounting for about 20 per cent of cases, or 50 new Australians diagnosed every day.

Wear and tear in the arteries caused by strokes or high blood pressure, which impairs blood flow to the brain, can damage the area responsible for learning, memory and language.

Researchers studied almost 3000 adults from the Framingham Heart Study, in which the first of three generations in the same US town have been followed since 1948.

They broke the cohort into 10-year age brackets from 45-94 years, comparing a person’s vascular health risk — their blood pressure, choles- terol, smoking and diabetes status — to their brain volume.

Brain shrinkage is a measure of overall cell death and brain health.

Lead researcher Dr Matthew Pase said they found that at every age a high risk for poor vascular health was associated with lower brain volume.

But the link was strongest when people were younger — with shrinkage evident as young as 45 — and was most pronounced in women.

“We think of dementia as a disease of old age, but Alzheimer’s has a 30-year lag time before symptoms appear,” Dr Pase said. “To have maximal impact, we need to take ownership earlier.”

In the second arm of the study, researchers analysed 40 years of health records of 7800 adults. They found a vascular health score at age 45 was a more accurate predictor of what the brain would look like in old age, compared with a later vascular assessment.

And addressing one risk factor wasn’t enough, with total vascular health improvement needed.

The findings were published in the journal Neurology.

To take part in the Florey’s Healthy Brain Study, tracking 6000 Australians from midlife to find dementia risk factors, go to healthybrainproject. org.au