Why Dementia Rates Are Soaring—and How to Fight Back

0:00There'd be just as many men getting dementia if they live long enough to get it. So the goal is we want to make you so healthy that you don't get heart disease, that you don't get cancer, but also so you don't get dementia, right? It wouldn't be a shame if we just help you live long enough so that you can spend the last 10, 15, sometimes 20 years of your life with dementia. That's not acceptable. Now this new study that was published in Nature Medicine was actually a study called Eric atherosclerosis risk in communities. They took 15,000 men and women starting at the age of 55 back in 1987. So we're looking at a study that began a little bit less than 40 years ago and they collected data up until 2020. Now what really I want to highlight here is that 35% of men developed dementia.

1:04So the lifetime risk of dementia for those that were over 55 years of age back in 1987 was 35%. What out of every three men who started out then, who were 55 or older in 1987 ended up developing dementia? Now that is more than double what it was for men who started out 10 years before that. So in just 10 years, the lifetime risk of dementia for men more than double, okay, and that's for a study that started 40 years ago. So we're in a lot of trouble right now because this is the risk of developing dementia is going through the roof. Now for women, it also more than doubled from 23% to 48%. So another one of the stats that was interesting, I have it here at the third paragraph of the

2:07summary, if alive in dementia three at age 75, in this study, there was a lifetime risk of dementia that was over 50% in the overall population and in almost all subpopulations as well. In other words, for those who were 55 and over back 40 years ago, as they lived their lives, there was one chance out of two that they would develop dementia and again, it is far, far worse today. Okay, so bottom line, why men, why women have more dementia? We already explained that men were less likely to survive to older age thus reducing their overall lifetime risk of developing dementia. Now another couple of take homes of this major study that was just published was that poor access to education, in other words, when you don't have ongoing learning stimuli, you're

3:12more likely to develop dementia. Or if you have poor nutrition either early in life or any time in your life, where you're focusing on refined foods rather than plant strong foods or natural foods, that those combinations contributed to earlier differences and what's called cognitive reserve. Now see, this is a really important concept because it's like if you're basically working out so that you can handle a certain amount of exercise or even trauma for that matter. That's what we would call a reserve capacity, a strength reserve where your muscles are able to handle a certain amount of exercise without being damaged or without you being injured in some way. Relative reserve is the same and that if we are not constantly building on that supply

4:17of cognitive reserve, we start losing that reserve capacity. And so we're going to be expanding on that throughout this lecture as well, but we need to live our lives such that we have every day, we're actually building on a reserve or helping maintain that reserve rather than that cognitive reserve, gradually being whittled away. So it's the same way, that's why by the way, that's one of the reasons that strength training is so important as we age in particular. This is not just for jocks. If you're not doing some type of strength training, which can be as simple as doing some sit down squats in your chair every day, even 10 or 20 of them, if you're not doing something to stimulate the large muscles of your body to stay strong, your strength reserve, your large muscle strength reserve is going to dwindle away and that is directly not only related

5:18to injury rates, but it's direct and fall rates, but it's directly related to the resiliency of your cognition of your brain. In other words, the stronger your muscles are, the stronger your brain is in resisting things that damage it. So that should be a motivation for all of us to have some level of strength training in our program, more in that in a little bit. And so the bottom line summary of this major study just published this year in nature medicine is saying that we, a policies that enhance prevention in healthy aging are urgent public health priorities for reducing substantial and growing burdens of dementia. I could not agree more. That is so critical. And of course, that's what we're going to be focusing on. Now I want to draw attention to this is a couple of the of the graphs that came out

6:18in this study. And the first thing I want to point out is again, the cumulative incidence of dementia in this study that started 40 years ago was 42%. But you see here on the right hand side that women had a higher rate of dementia than men, but we explained why because they live longer and therefore more likely to be diagnosed. Now look at the discrepancy here between blacks and whites. You see that they're actually fairly similar. Whites have a lifetime risk of 41% of developing dementia in their lifetime. Blacks had a 44%, so about 3% higher than whites did. Now so that is a racial disparity that we hear about. Now what's interesting at one of the 10 steps that I'm going to highlight today and we'll talk about later on is the importance of optimizing your vitamin D levels.

7:22And it actually applies directly to the apparent racial disparity here and the incidence or the likelihood of developing dementia in our lifetime. And I actually believe looking at the research that this disparity of 3% would be largely removed if everybody tested their vitamin D levels and optimized their vitamin D levels or at least got their vitamin D blood levels above 40 nanograms per ml. Okay, so by the way, most people, unless they're supplementing at least 4 to 5,000 units of vitamin D a day, are going to be under 40. How do I know this? I've actually been measuring every patient's vitamin D for the last 25 years. And that was after I read a study that came out of Harvard back in the early 2000s that

8:28showed that the level of vitamin D in your blood had more to do with whether or not you got cancer statistically speaking than whether you smoked or not.