Avoiding three health factors may delay the odds of developing dementia by about 13 years, a new study has found: type 2 diabetes, smoking and high blood pressure.
Scientific research has long established that these risk factors are three of the strongest for dementia, and that the neurodegenerative disease’s development begins long before symptoms arrive, said Dr. Josef Coresh, senior author of the study that published Wednesday in the journal Neurology Open Access. But Coresh’s new study of more than 12,400 adults quantified how much the combination of these vascular measures in middle age may have influenced when dementia began to set in.
Participants who had those three health hazards when they were, on average, about age 56 were more than twice as likely to develop dementia and more than five times as likely to die prematurely from another cause.
“That’s relatively easy for clinicians to discuss and patients to understand,” said Coresh, founding director of the Optimal Aging Institute at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. For patients, knowing how many more “good years” they can get by making certain lifestyle changes can be more motivating than simply knowing a percentage risk for dementia, Coresh added.
