A new study shows that as Americans live longer, our risk for dementia is rising. The new numbers are almost twice as high as previously thought by the year 2060.

What does that mean for patients and for us as a society?

Dr. Josef Coresh, director of the Optimal Aging Institute at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, led that study and joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today” to share what his team found.  

Coresh explained that dementia is a progressive cognitive decline that affects patients’ ability to function. There are several pathways to dementia, including Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia. Coresh shared what he’s discovered in his research. 

“We followed 15,000 people for four decades. And what we wanted to do was ask a simple question. If you go four decades, from age 55 to 95, we know that you’ll either end up at death first, or dementia before death. We wanted to know how often you get dementia on the way to death. We found out that statistic on average was about 42%. Now, importantly, it took a long time. So if you start at 55, the risk by age 75 is 4%. The risk by age 85 is 20%. And the risk in a decade or more after age 85 is the majority of the risk, up to that 42%,” he explained. 

Different groups have higher risk than others, for various reasons. 

“Black Americans had higher risk of dementia at an earlier age, and that may have related to most of our Black participants being from Jackson, Mississippi and maybe having weaker educational opportunities, early in life, which we’ll talk about as a risk factor for dementia. We also found that, as expected, people with a genetic susceptibility ApoE4 had a higher risk at an earlier age. And then we found women had a higher risk. But for women in our study, at any one age, the risk was the same, but the risk of mortality was much lower. So the women lived longer, were more likely to get to age 85, and therefore were more likely to get the dementia before that,” Coresh said. 

Dr. Coresh provided some ways that people can help prevent dementia, starting early in life. 

“The more education you can get your children and young adults, the more reserve they have. And that protects you for the next 60 years. Traumatic brain injury. Don’t injury your brain in football, falling off a bicycle, etc. or in older age, just falling in general. And if you do, make sure the brain rests and you recover rather than getting cumulative damage. Then, in midlife, an emphasis on vascular risk factors. Good blood pressure, preventing diabetes, obesity. Alcohol. Good sleep. Later in life, we have a lot of sensory deficits. So you want to keep track of hearing loss and visual loss, which can lead to social isolation, which is another risk factor,” he shared.

Watch the full interview above.

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