Prevent dementia by being heart smart

Monday October 25, 2010, The Star


KUALA LUMPUR: Adopting a healthy lifestyle from young can slow down the onset of dementia in old age, said a neurologist.

“If people live healthily and keep vascular problem, diabetes, hypertension and visceral obesity at bay, it would help in the long term to prevent dementia,” said cognitive behaviour neurologist Prof Dr Bhaskara P. Shelley from the Father Muller Medical College in Karnataka, India.

“If you modify your lifestyle and adopt healthy behaviours, it will help protect your brain,” he said, adding that when the brain is protected, the ravages of dementia will be delayed.

While ageing can lead to a healthy person suffering dementia, an unhealthy lifestyle will increase the risk and prevalence, said Dr Shelley in his paper on Healthy Brain Ageing and Preventive Neurology Strategies at the 13th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of Alzheimer’s Disease International which ended yesterday.

An unhealthy lifestyle depletes the brain’s reserves and precipitates dementia, he added.

Exercise can bring down the build up of amyloid plaques that are thought to contribute to the degradation of the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain and the subsequent symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease, the main type of dementia.

Dr Shelley also said that a good diet also serves as brain fertiliser and rejuvenates the brain so that dementia does not come too soon.

The idea is to delay the onset of dementia until one outlives one’s life before the disease sets in, he said.

He debunked the myth that Alzheimer’s Disease affects those aged above 65 and said it actually occurs 20 to 30 years earlier.

“The neuro-pathology that starts off (the disease) is very early but most drug treatments are done only after the disease is diagnosed, so that’s pretty late,” he said.

It was important for doctors to use the right drugs at that point of time, he said.

The physical symptoms of dementia at that age may not be clear but diseases like high cholesterol, hypertension and others could determine if one is in the high-risk group, he said.