“We are learning that tactics to avoid dementia begin early and continue throughout life, so it’s never too early or too late to take action,” says commission member and AAIC presenter Lon Schneider, MD, co-director of the USC Alzheimer Disease Research Center‘s clinical core and professor of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences and neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
LOS ANGELES — Modifying 12 risk factors over a lifetime could delay or prevent 40% of dementia cases, according to an updated report by the Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, intervention and care presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC 2020).
Twenty-eight world-leading dementia experts added three new risk factors in the new report — excessive alcohol intake and head injury in mid-life and air pollution in later life. These are in addition to nine factors previously identified by the commission in 2017: less education early in life; mid-life hearing loss, hypertension and obesity; and smoking, depression, social isolation, physical inactivity and diabetes later in life (65 and up).
Schneider and commission members recommend that policymakers and individuals adopt the following interventions:
- Aim to maintain systolic blood pressure of 130 mm Hg or less from the age of 40.
- Encourage use of hearing aids for hearing loss and reduce hearing loss by protecting ears from high noise levels.
- Reduce exposure to air pollution and second-hand tobacco smoke.
- Prevent head injury (particularly by targeting high-risk occupations).
- Limit alcohol intake to no more than 21 units per week (one unit of alcohol equals 10 ml or 8 g pure alcohol).
- Stop smoking and support others to stop smoking.
- Provide all children with primary and secondary education.
- Lead an active life into mid-life and possibly later life.
- Reduce obesity and the linked condition of diabetes.
Many Americans are willing to make significant personal tradeoffs to lower their health insurance rates or medical costs, such as agreeing to 24/7 personal monitoring or working with artificial intelligence instead of a human doctor, the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism finds.
of the artist’s expansive and materials-focused practice from the 1970s to the present.
Charles Arnoldi was a young man from Dayton, Ohio who had seen little of the world when he arrived in Southern California in the mid 1960s. Following stints at a local community college and Chouinard Art Institute, Arnoldi won LACMA’s New or Young Talent Award in 1969 and thus began his ever-evolving career which continues to this day in his sprawling Venice studio.
Contrary to popular opinion, when it comes to well-being, our lives do not represent an inevitable decline from the sunny uplands of youth to the valley of death. Instead, the opposite is true — we can confidently look forward to old age as the happiest time of our lives.
So why do people grow happier as they age? Is it an absence of stress, or are they able to focus more on what brings them joy?
The team found 85% of people first diagnosed with dementia were diagnosed by a non-dementia specialist physician, usually a primary care doctor, and an “unspecified dementia” diagnosis was common.
Boomers Daily 