How exactly do lifestyle interventions benefit brain health? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If you have mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s disease, changes in lifestyle are more likely to provide benefit to your cognitive capacity than available medicines, a study by Johns Hopkins neurologist Majid Fotuhi shows. Fotuhi says this is largely due to changing habits that have likely been lifelong.

Fotuhi: When patients get older there are many things that happen inside their brain. With each decade of life if they have a sedentary lifestyle, if they have a poor diet, if they have poor sleep, if they have untreated obstructive sleep apnea, if they never challenge their brain there is increased inflammation in the brain mostly related to diet. There's reduced blood flow and it is reduction of the brain's natural cleaning system called the lymphatic system so all these things affect the brain and make the brain age faster.  :32

Fotuhi says it’s important to be patient and systematic when trying to make multiple lifestyle changes. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.