Alzheimer's Disease Updates: Onset of Disease Can Be Delayed with Certain Lifestyle Changes, Research Claims
While there are many food supplements in the market these days that claim to help prevent Alzheimer's disease, a recent research has revealed that no medicine can stop the disease from taking over individuals.
More than 5 million Americans are afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, and the number is expected to increase as the populace ages. Unfortunately, while there are drugs, such as Aricept, which can reduce the symptoms, they do not help in slowing the disease.
However, according to the committee at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, certain lifestyle changes can help people reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease, or, at least, delay its onset: Managing high blood pressure, exercising on a regular basis, and engaging in memory-training activities may just do the trick, experts say.
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"Even though clinical trials have not conclusively supported the three interventions discussed in our report, the evidence is strong enough to suggest the public should at least have access to these results to help inform their decisions about how they can invest their time and resources to maintain brain health with aging," explained Dr. Alan Leshner, chair of the committee and CEO emeritus of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Of all the mentioned lifestyle changes that are said to delay dementia, the committee revealed that the most promising is memory-training. However, while playing crossword puzzles or Sudoku is an acceptable way to improve memory, it has been revealed that a specialized training, such as memory-improvement or mnemonics techniques, proves to be the most beneficial.
Last month, it was reported that the number of deaths caused by Alzheimer's disease has risen by 55 percent in the past 15 years. While it is suspected that the rise in the number can be due to the aging population, better diagnosis of the disease and the willingness of the doctors to list the disease as the cause of patients' death in their death certificates are also suspected as contributing factors to the increase in the statistics of Alzheimer's-caused deaths.
