A study by New York University explains how the choices made between the ages of 45 and 65 can be worth up to 13 years of life without dementia. According to an analysis published in The Lancet, in the world cases of dementia are destined to almost triple, reaching 153 million by 2050. Yet, accordin…
A study by New York University explains how the choices made between the ages of 45 and 65 can be worth up to 13 years of life without dementia. According to an analysis published in The Lancet, in the world cases of dementia are destined to almost triple, reaching 153 million by 2050. Yet, according to the same researchers, nearly half of these could be avoided or at least delayed by intervening on a series of risk factors. Especially during the so-called middle age, that is between 45 and 65 years old. The study, published in the Neurology journal, was born from the analysis of the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities, a research started in 1986 in the United States that has been following the same group of people for decades to verify their changes. The researchers, led by Josef Coresh of NYU Langone Health in New York, selected 12,409 people free from dementia, with an average age of 56 years, following them for about 26 years: in that period 3,008 of them developed the disease. And often, they were joined by 3 risk factors: high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and smoking. The discovery is that those who had none of these risk factors lived on average 30.1 years without dementia, against 26.3 of those who had one, 21 of those who had two and just over 17 of those who had all three. And the sense of the discovery would be precisely in the gap between the two extremes: almost thirteen years. Even sex would play its part: among those who showed having all three risk factors, women lived without dementia 18.1 years against 16.6 of men. But this does not change that reducing risk factors, especially starting from middle age 'allows us to protect brain health for more than a decade'. prevention is better — Attention: the study does not demonstrate a cause/effect relationship. The researchers measured blood pressure, glucose and smoking only once at the beginning of the path, without registering what happened afterwards, if someone, for example, stopped smoking or developed hypertension along the way. So it should be considered as a statistical data, useful to guide prevention policies rather than to predict the fate of an individual. But it is also true, emphasize the researchers, that 'diabetes, hypertension and smoking often emerge precisely in middle age and exert an effect on neurodegenerative diseases'. An effect lasting well 13 years.
