Proven Methods For Effectively Combating Alzheimer’s Disease & Dementia
Alzheimer’s disease starts with a protein called “amyloid beta”.
It is a sticky protein that binds to itself and forms “amyloid plaques”.
When enough amyloid plaques accumulate in the brain, at some point a threshold is reached that leads to neurofibrillary tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death, and all the symptoms we classically know as Alzheimer’s.
Before this tipping point, you are symptom-free.
That’s kind of like saying high cholesterol doesn’t equal a heart attack.
Alzheimer’s starts in the hippocampus, the place in your brain responsible for forming new memories.
So the very first symptoms of Alzheimer’s are not remembering what someone said a few minutes ago, repeating yourself over and over because you don’t remember what you just said, not remembering what happened last week even if it was very emotional, significant, new, surprising or repetitive.
Things you would normally remember from last week are not consolidated because your hippocampus is under attack.
Alzheimer’s shifts, it doesn’t just stay in your hippocampus.
It invades your frontal lobe, so you get problems with problem-solving and decision-making.
It infests parts of your brain that have to do with where things are in space, so you may get lost in the neighborhood you’ve lived in all your life.
It invades the parts of your brain that have to do with language, so you’ll have more and more trouble finding words.
The disease will spread to the limbic system and cause changes in emotions and personality.
Most of what we forget on a daily basis is completely normal and will likely remain so throughout our lives.
If you don’t get enough sleep, the glial cells don’t have enough time to do their job, and you wake up in the morning with extra amyloid in your brain that hasn’t been broken down.
If this happens over decades, 15 to 20 years of amyloid plaque accumulation, it increases your risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
What You Can Actually Start Doing Now
Green leafy vegetables, colorful fruits and berries, fatty fish, nuts, beans, and olive oil.
These are the foods that support your brain health and help you prevent Alzheimer’s.
A brisk walk of 30 minutes, four to five times a week, is enough to lower amyloid plaque levels and reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by one-third to one-half.
Chronic stress is really bad for our memory, both today in creating new memories and in the future when it comes to the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
Chronic stress keeps cortisol levels elevated.
You are in a constant state of fight or flight.
This is really bad for your hippocampus.
It shrinks your hippocampus by inhibiting “neurogenesis,” the creation of new neurons.
Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, exercise, and being with people.
If you live a life where you are cognitively active and learn new things regularly, you build up what is called a “cognitive reserve.”
Every time you learn something new, you form new synapses, and you build new neural connections which take longer to vanish.
Credit: Big Think YouTube Channel and Lisa Genova
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