August 21, 2017 – Preventing Alzheimer’s

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: Can much of Alzheimer’s disease be prevented? Elizabeth Tracey reports

One-third of all cases of Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented if people exercised regularly, kept mentally engaged, didn’t smoke and controlled their blood pressure, a study presented at the recent Alzheimer’s disease meeting estimated. Constantine Lyketsos, an Alzheimer’s expert at Johns Hopkins, says some of that is age-dependent.

Lyketsos: If you’re talking about say age 75, it’s not unrealistic to think that you could have a huge effect on the risk of Alzheimer’s at 75 by what you do in these areas at age 50. But if you extend your horizon to age 80 or 90, where there’s much more biologic pressure to develop dementia I think the impact is going to be lower. But we’re already seeing effects, we’re already seeing reductions in the incidence of dementia in younger ages, which we believe is related to all these major changes.  :28

Lyketsos encourages everyone to adopt these lifestyle habits to reduce their risk of many chronic diseases. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.