New study sheds light on the root causes of cognitive decline
It starts slowly: You can’t find the word that’s on the tip of your tongue; you don’t recognize the new neighbor you met a few days back; you can’t remember what you ate for dinner last night
Then you notice more problems: You leave the stove burner on after you’ve served a meal; you struggle to remember the date for a major life event, though you’ve always known it; you slip up and tell someone you’re 38 when you’re actually in your 80s.
Worst of all, as you’re confusing your age for the year you were born, you actually believe that’s how old you are.
The late atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, who was a close colleague and my mom’s friend, was sharper at 90 than most people are at 22. But his formidable brain was the exception, not the rule.
Even though the brain is highly adaptable and we can mask age-related forgetfulness well, most of us experience some cognitive decline as we age.
What Predicts Age-Related and Non-Age-Related Cognitive Decline?
A team of researchers from Ohio State University and the University of Michigan asked what are the causes of age-related and non-age-related cognitive decline?
Published on Feb. 8 in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One, the team’s research was based on data from over 7,000 participants who were part of a larger longitudinal study that ran from 1996 to 2016.
The data analyzed were from American adults who were born between 1931 and 1941.
This cohort came from the Health and Retirement Study, a much larger study of over 20,000 people over the age of 50, which had previously measured participants’ cognitive functioning.
Dementia Accounts for Only 41 Percent of Declining Cognitive Function
Researchers found that within the aging population of the United States, dementia only accounted for 41 percent of cognitive decline.
Of the people who have dementia-related cognitive decline, between 30 and 34 percent suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, 4 to 8 percent from Lewy body dementia (which is related to Parkinson’s disease), and 1 to 3 percent have some other kind of cerebrovascular disease.
But what about the causes of non-dementia-related cognitive decline?
The most important factor appeared to be socioeconomic.
“It is critical to discover why some individuals’ cognitive abilities are better than others, and why their cognitive declines are slower,” the researchers wrote. “Solving this problem has important ramifications for policymakers and medical interventions.”
Education Matters
The researchers found that household wealth and income, levels of depression, education, occupation, and race all played a role in predicting cognitive outcomes.
Though also important, the participants’ early life conditions, adult behaviors, and co-morbidities did not play as strong a predictive role.
Participants who had good early education and who stayed in school the longest appeared to have the best cognitive health.
Better cognitive functioning at age 54 and slower cognitive decline after that age was positively correlated with higher socioeconomic status.
In other words, those with the best functioning brains tended to have more education, more robust incomes, and more accumulated wealth than participants whose brains were not working as well.
As this research allowed for nuance, the scientists further found that the number of years of education was not significantly associated with cognitive functioning but that participants with a college degree had slower cognitive decline than those who had not graduated from college.
Marriage Protects Your Cognition
The researchers also examined marital status, number of times married, number of living children, religious affiliation, and self-assessed symptoms of depression (via scoring on a Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression assessment).
As other longitudinal studies have found, people who were not married did worse cognitively than those who were married.
And being widowed after age 54 appeared to cause steep cognitive declines.
At the same time, this study found that having more children led to lower cognitive functioning in midlife but did not appear to accelerate cognitive decline afterward.
Unhealthy Behaviors Correlated With Cognitive Decline
The researchers also examined “bio-behavioral” factors, including body mass index, smoking, and how much vigorous activity the participants did.
Unsurprisingly, people who had markedly unhealthy lifestyle practices—including those who were morbidly obese and those who smoked cigarettes—had lower cognitive functioning and steeper cognitive declines as they aged than participants with healthier lifestyle practices.
Having a chronic disease, including diabetes, heart disease, and psychiatric problems, was also correlated with lower cognitive functioning.
Engaging in vigorous exercise improved cognitive functioning in general but did not change the downward trend of age-related cognitive decline over time.
“Socioeconomic factors—in particular, the quality and quantity of one’s early education—exerts an influence on future cognitive health through the contribution to cognitive reserve,” Karen D. Sullivan, a board-certified clinical neuropsychologist, told MedicalNewsToday.
“Cognitively complex activities contribute to our ‘brain bank’ by building layers and layers of neural networks that can better withstand future neurodegeneration,” she said.
Stay Sharp: Some Takeaways
“All the controlled factors only explained 5.6 percent of the variation in age slope at the population level,” they wrote. So the majority of variation in why some people experience cognitive decline more quickly than others “was not explained.”
Given that these are still unanswered questions, how do we maximize our brain health and minimize cognitive dysfunction?
Brains Have ‘Remarkable Capacity to Adapt and Change’
“Our brains have the remarkable capacity to adapt and change throughout our lives,” Donnie Yance, who is an expert in botanical and nutritional healing, explained on his website.
“We can and should maximize our brain health,” Dr. Cammy Benton, an integrative doctor based in Huntersville, North Carolina, said in an interview with The Epoch Times.
Benton has found that certain lifestyle practices, including consuming phytonutrients in plants, greatly improve the brain health of her patients.
Benton says daily exercise is key, that it’s important to eat “from the rainbow” (meaning a variety of brightly colored fruits and vegetables), and to use lots of spices and herbs to help with brain detoxification and inflammation.
Sleep Matters
Benton also believes sleep is important.
“Honor the circadian rhythm,” she said. “Go to bed by 10 o’clock, be up with the sun, exercise in the morning, and go for a brisk evening walk.”
Botanicals for Brain Health
In particular, he points to adding certain well-researched plants, particularly adaptogens, to your daily vitamin and mineral regime.
According to Yance, the botanicals that improve the brain’s ability to adapt and change include:
- Water hyssop (Bacopa monnieri)
- Saffron (Crocus sativus)
- Siberian ginseng (Eleutherococcus senticosus)
- Green tea (Camellia sinensis)
- Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba)
- St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum)
- Olive leaf (Olea europaea)
- Ginseng (Panax ginseng)
- Rhodiola rosea
- Red sage (Salvia miltiorrhiza)
- Grapes (Vitis vinifera)
- Horny goat weed (Epimedium)
- Ashwagandha (Withania somnifera)
Stay in the Game of Life
Dr. Robert Lowry, a neurologist and sports medicine physician based in San Antonio, Texas, also believes that staying physically and mentally active is key.
“Stay mentally in the game of life and challenge yourself,” Lowry said in an interview with The Epoch Times. “Keep learning new things—play a musical instrument, travel.”
Other practitioners recommend using hyperbaric oxygen to slow or even reverse brain decline.
Me? I’m heading out on my foot ponies to the library to look for a book on meditation, another activity that purportedly improves cognition.
One sec. Let me just make sure I turned the stove off first.
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Howdy
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What, are we supposed to be razor sharp until the end? No, it’s a fact of life that the body declines as it’s job is (or should have been) done. some are better than others, which is due to their ‘makeuo’.
There are 3 major states in life. Youth, middle age, and the crone. You won’t find the answer in studies of people, nor science at all.
“James Lovelock, who was a close colleague and my mom’s friend, was sharper at 90 than most people are at 22”
REally? There are those who would see his Gaia hypothesis as signs of problems.
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Howdy
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makeuo = makeup
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End Rockefeller Medicine
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The travesty of memory-holing Nikola Tesla’s work is that the deliberate defunding of certain crucial and beneficial studies still goes on today. People like Fauci are in charge of moving billions of dollars around to universities and research foundations, making sure that any venture outside the “official narrative” of Scientism, or psyop science, aka psyence, would be unplugged immediately, as in the case of Prof. Chris Exley:
Aluminum Expert Reveals Vaccines Are Likely Cause Of Alzheimers
Published on February 1, 2023
“Dr. Christopher Exley, a former Professor of Bioinorganic Chemistry known for his research around aluminum reveals its true toxicity and how it is being used in vaccines.
In a previous study Dr. Exley conducted into Alzheimer’s he found there were high levels of aluminum in the brain and delved further into this with a study on autistic brains.
In his discussion with Highwire, Dr. Exley looks into how aluminum was approved for vaccine use despite the lack of human studies done into the effects.
He concludes that the highest rates of aluminum were found in the brains of autistic people even more so than Alzheimer’s and Dr. Exley wanted to track how we inject aluminum and launched a brain study. The launch of this study caused him to lose his job and his position of professor and the funding was removed from the universities conducting these studies.”
https://thehighwire.com/videos/is-alzheimers-linked-to-aluminum-exposure/
Most people are not “anti-vaxx”. They are anti-toxic adjuvants. The US has the highest first day infant deaths in the world. Newborns are dosed with aluminum levels that are off the charts, so no small wonder. The directed evolution of Scientism by defunding real science research needs to end.
(Rescued from spam list) SUNMOD
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Jennifer and PSI Readers,
You wrote: “The late atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, who was a close colleague and my mom’s friend, was sharper at 90 than most people are at 22. But his formidable brain was the exception, not the rule.”
I ask you: How many 90 and 90+ people do you personally know? I have personally known several to many and only one continued to live totally removed from reality. And this one was my mother. Who was 13 years younger than my father who died just over 90. And immediately after he died she clearly stated that her goal in life, at that time, had been to take care of him. So she consciously retired from life at that time and lived until she died in the upper 90’s (I don’t remember exactly if it was 95 or 96 or?) because it doesn’t matter to me who just turned 82 and I am not retiring from life as I hope, if you read this, see the evidence that I have not yet retired from life and do not plan to.
And yes, many of us over 80 have personally learned a lot during of those 2 decades of experiences which we hadn’t yet had at the age of 60. And if you are not yet 60, you cannot know what you might learn during your next 2 decades.
Have a good day
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Joe
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It is all about diet…..eat meat…….our ancestors did, and that is why we are here!
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