I'm out of the woods, but news on declining dementia rates

First, I want to thank those of you who sent messages of support during my recent adventure with sepsis and kidney stones.  It appears that this week my doctors and I will be wrapping it all up.  Life goes on.

And something else interesting has come across my screen regarding how it is that dementia rates are declining as we discussed in Beating the Dementia Monster.  Spoiler alert: New research has partly supported some of the speculation in my book.

In the very last section of the second edition, "Good news/Bad news," I said that Alzheimer's disease rates in Western countries has actually been declining over the past 25 years despite an aging population.  I said that perhaps this was due to placing a lot of emphasis on reducing cardiovascular risk factors.  We noted that doctors like to say, "What's good for the heart is good for the brain."  And so there has been a significant reduction in cigarette smoking and an increased use of drugs to control blood pressure.  I'd like to say that people have lost weight, are eating better, and are exercising more, but that may not be true.  Nevertheless, the incidences of both cardiovascular disease and dementia have fallen together.

There is a new study on this published in the February 20 edition of JAMA Neurology, "Trends in Postmortem Neurodegenerative and Cerebrovascular Neuropathologies Over 25 Years."  The study examined the 25-year trends in incidence of dementia and trends in cardiovascular disease, confirming their consistency.  But they came to a conclusion a little different from mine.

I speculated that it was Alzheimer's disease that was declining, when they concluded that it was dementia that was declining.  Even when members of the cohort of 1,540 subjects had less dementia, they still had no decrease in the amyloid plaques and tangles that characterize Alzheimer's disease.  This was determined through autopsies of all test subjects.  (We said in Beating the Dementia Monster, the final confirmation of Alzheimer's disease is in the autopsy.)

So what's the takeaway here?  If you're like me, and you're told that you have Alzheimer's disease, you can still stave off dementia through lifestyle changes.  You will likely still have Alzheimer's disease, but you can at least delay the accompanying physical and mental decline of dementia.  These are lifestyle changes that fight cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome (including diabetes).  This is exactly what we designed The Dementia Toolkit to do.