Back to the theme of dementia, and we are at week 3. A question I have asked myself many times is can dementia be prevented? Billions are spent looking for treatments, and hopefully success will come, but what if there were ways we could reduce our risk in the first place?
Primary prevention is the term doctors use for interventions designed to reduce the risk of a condition developing before there are any signs of it. I consider myself an ‘at risk’ adult (remember statistically one third of us could be affected to a degree), even though at the time of writing I am 45 years old. Dementia, much like heart disease, is many decades in the making. Lifestyle choices I make consistently at this point in my life are statistically likely to reduce my risk of a number of chronic health issues in my 70s, 80s, and perhaps beyond. An argument in support of this, is that the clear signs of dementia actually occur fairly late. So-called ‘pre-clinical stage’ changes in the brain can occur for decades before the onset of symptoms, but a patient may still have very subtle features of mild cognitive impairment.
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