Dear Readers: I rarely run guest posts, however this
offer was too good to pass up. Dr. Michael
Mullan of the Roskamp Institute is a biomedical researcher in the field of neurodegenerative
disorders and CEO & President of the Roskamp Institute in Sarasota, FL., a non-profit
research center whose main goal is to discover new and effective treatments for
Alzheimer's disease. Read on to learn more about lifestyle and Alzheimer’s:
Although
AD is regarded largely as a disease of the elderly, in fact, the seeds of the
disorder can be sown quite early in life. We now know that a wide variety of
influences during midlife can influence our subsequent risk for the disease. In
some cases, the link between midlife activities and medical conditions and
late-life Alzheimer's are obscure but, in other cases, the underlying
biological reasons for these associations are being established.
Broadly,
late-life risks for AD determined
by midlife experiences can be divided into four categories: midlife
medical conditions; midlife mental activity; midlife diet; and physical
activity. Under the category of midlife medical conditions, it's now well
established that midlife diabetes, hypertension and obesity are all risks for
late-life AD. To be clear, it is not a diagnosis of hypertension per se that
increases risk of late onset AD, but, rather, uncontrolled high blood pressure.
Thus in several large population based studies including the Honolulu Asia
aging study and the Kuopio study in Finland raised diastolic (above 95 mm Hg)
and systolic (greater than 160 mm Hg) were associated with late-life risk for
dementia.
