THE GREY MATTERS
Is it possible to turn back time on the brain and make our minds fitter and sharper than ever before? The second part of our Ten Years Younger series focuses on our grey matter and what you can do to keep it fit and healthy… whatever age you are. Two expe
Research has shown the benefit of keeping cognitive abilities strong.
People who have challenged their brains throughout their lives have a lower risk of developing dementia.
And if you already have mild cognitiveg impairment, then if youy you exercise your yyour brain, brain,, you yyou can keep keepp your cognitivecognitiveco abilities stronger for longer. llonger.
Just as exercise is good for your physical health, so it is good for your brain health too.
Do people need to sprint for an hour a day? No, of course not. The key is pushing yourself a little so that your heartbeat raises to the point where you feel it in your breath, and you’ve got a little bit of sweat – not dripping in sweat.
When the heartbeat is raised, that increases blood flow to the brain and brings oxygen and nutrients to the neurons, making them healthier.
At the age of 30, we might need to go for a jog to increase our heart rate but perhaps when we are 50 or 60 you get the same health benefits from a brisk walk or even yoga.
I would always encourage peoplepp as they age to go for an annual health check and ask for their vitamin levels to be checked.
Vitamin deficiencies happen as we age and can affect cognition.
A great and easy way to exercise the brain is through active learning.
Find a topic you are interested in or even do something new. The key is making sure you enjoy it.
Lots of people think that to exercise your brain youy have to do word puzzles.p But lots of ppeopleppeople hate word puzzles, ppuzzles,, so find other ways to test your brain that you enjoy.
Maybe you have always wanted to study a language, so take a language class.
It’s doing something as simple as finding a different way to drive home for a week.
When we do something we haven’t done before – when we are learning – that gets the neurons fired up in our brain.
Our brains need a well-rounded workout – just like our bodies. If when doing a physical workout we only lifted weights for one muscle and didn’t exercise the others, then it wouldn’t be a very good workout. For the same reason, we should do a variety of brain exercises that target different cognitive abilities.
For example, during your working years, you might be in a job that involves problem solving and using your reasoning skills every day, which is great for those cognitive abilities, but you have to be mindful of what is missing from your life.
You might have a job where your processing skills are fast and efficient but it involved no reasoning skills.
Think about what cognitive abilities you use on a daily basis and be mindful of what else you should be doing.g
Managingg stress and depression is really reallyy importantp as we age. Research shows that depression increases the risk of Alzheimer’s.
Depression is often misdiagnosed in the elderly. We need to be really mindful that, as people get older, there can be an increased risk of causes of depression.
We often lose our loved ones – it’s a fact as we get older. This can often go hand in hand with an increased risk of loneliness, which again is not good for the brain.
We can reduce our mental age or increase it.
At the age of 20, we are much more flexible in our thinking than at the age of 50,50 when a person is usually more rigid in their thinking.
Cognitive flexibility is a skill. I treat patients with very low cognitive flexibility and one of the things I’m looking at is how do we train them to develop the skill of cognitive flexibility – and to be able to change and open their mind.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that it is never too early to start thinking about brain health – and trying to keep the brain healthy for as long as possible to delay the onset of dementia. And it is never too early to start thinking about what can be done to reduce your risk. The things you do to avoid heart disease and diabetes are also the things that help keep your brain healthy. If you have vascular disease in the brain, , that can lead to dementia. So exercising,g exercising, lookingglooking after youry your blood pressure and not smoking are justjustj as importantip important forf for your yyour brainbi brain as they are for other organs in your body. There is not fantastic evidence of the link between diet and brain health but certainly there seems to be strong evidence of a link between lower levels of vitamin D and dementia. We get vitamin D from diet and sunlight – although no one in this countryy gets adequate sunlight exposure in the winter months that would provide them with enough vitamin D. One large UK supermarket has recently fortified its bread with vitamin D, while in Australia it’s been added to margarine. It is complicated and not entirely clear why there is a link between brain health and depression but there is. Depression in early life is not related but later on, , in middle ageg and upwards,p depressionp depression seems to be associated with problems in terms of brain health and memory.memory While the total number of people with dementia is increasing, the actual percentage of the population with dementia is reducing and we are looking at the role early-life education may have had on long-term brain health. Recent generations have had more educational opportunities in their early life – they stayed at school for longer as the compulsory leavers’ age was increased, so they were learning for longer, which may have had an impactp on their brain.
Brain-training games are not terriblyy terribly helpfulp helpful if yyou you keep doing the same thing over again.
If you are only doing crosswords, then you may get very good at doing crosswords but it is not going to stimulate other areas of the brain that need to be exercised too.
Brain-training games are part of what you can do to keep your brain healthy but they are not a silver bullet.
Keeping socially active seems to be helpful in terms of keeping you mentally sharp. Make sure you keep up with social activities.
When people are working, they are usually meeting people and keeping socially active. But often when a person retires, then they might suddenly find the number of people they are chatting to everyy dayy reduces dramatically,y so it is important to keep yourself socially active.active
Drinking a moderate amount of alcohol has a link with cardiovascular disease. Many of the people I see in my clinic who have started to get some minor symptoms tend to drink more than they should.
They don’t have an alcohol problem but their alcohol consumption is a bit more than it is probably healthy to drink.
There is a bit more speculation about what has an environmental influence as far as dementia is concerned. There appears to be a link with air pollution but obviously that is less easy for an individual to do something about as reductions in air pollution would involve legislation, guidelines and low emission areas being set up.