Can sport increase our risk for dementia? We all know that physical activity and in particular exercise is good for us and our brain. Large scale population-level (epidemiological) studies have shown time and again how higher levels of physical activity and exercise can reduce our future risk for dementia by up to a whopping 40%! … Continue reading Can sport increase our risk for dementia?
What is brain shrinkage/’atrophy’ in dementia When receiving a diagnosis of dementia, many people hear for the first time the term brain ‘atrophy’. The term is usually given by the clinician providing the diagnosis when discussing their brain scan. For example, “you have mild atrophy in your brain, suggesting that you might have the early … Continue reading What is brain shrinkage/’atrophy’ in dementia?
Most of us will have heard that lifestyle choices, such as physical activity, diet and sleep, can affect our risk for dementia. Indeed, scientific evidence is quite strong that making the right lifestyle choices can reduce our future risk for dementia by up to 40%. But how do these lifestyle choices actually reduce our risk … Continue reading How do our lifestyle choices reduce our risk of dementia?
Oral Health in dementia Oral health is often somewhat overlooked when talking about dementia. Obviously, dental health is important but what is the relevance for dementia? There is increasing scientific evidence showing that oral health can not only have an effect on general brain health but more importantly dementia progression and even mortality. Based on … Continue reading How important is oral health in dementia?
Brain vascular changes, such as small vessel disease, are quite common during ageing and they have been shown to increase our risk for dementia, in particular Vascular Dementia. But do such brain vascular changes always lead to dementia? The short answer is no, the changes increase our risk for dementia considerable but they do not … Continue reading Do brain vascular changes always lead to dementia?
Many people will have never heard of behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia but it is, in my opinion, one of the most devastating dementias. The reason for its devastating status is that this type of dementia changes people’s personality and behaviour drastically. Most of us will be familiar with behavioural symptoms in dementia, which for many … Continue reading Rare Dementia Series – Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia
We often think that cognitive changes, such as loss of memory in Alzheimer’s disease, are the earliest changes in dementia. But is that the case? In fact, there is a whole cascade of other disease processes occurring in the brain before memory symptoms emerge, which has implications for how we will diagnose and treat dementia … Continue reading Are memory symptoms the start of Alzheimer’s disease?
We often talk more about the common forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Vascular dementia, which, together, account for ~70-80% of all people with dementia. The remaining ~20-30% of dementia get often overlooked and are therefore also commonly under-recognised or plainly misunderstood. Time to change that. In this series, we are going to … Continue reading Rare dementia series – Posterior Cortical Atrophy
Risk factors for dementia are by now well known, in particular how our lifestyle choices can influence our risk for dementia. But much less is known in how much our environment potentially influences the risk for dementia. The few research studies which investigated the environmental influences on the risk for developing dementia did not find … Continue reading Air pollution and dementia risk
The last year was clearly dominated by COVID-19, not only on a personal but also a scientific level. The focus on COVID-19 science and that we all seem to be these days expert epidemiologists and virologists, somewhat blinkered other scientific advances – including in dementia science. Of course, many dementia scientific studies had to stop … Continue reading 2020 vision – Dementia Science review of the last year
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