Friday, April 15, 2011

New research suggests ways to prevent Alzheimer's disease....

Today's Post: Friday, 4-15-2011


On Wednesday this week, a study was released that found that 10 years before symptoms of Alzheimer’s appeared, areas of the brain involved in thinking and memory had physically shrunk. I saw the story reported on two separate news services.

This is useful for two reasons:

This provides a way to see risk years in advance.

But of more use, it suggests that people who actively do the things that prevent brain cell loss or build new brain cells can prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

For example, people use language and memory skills to learn new things and those who do regular exercise sufficient to keep up good circulation to the brain and release the nerve and brain cell growth factor BDNF may either be able to prevent Alzheimer's disease or even halt it before it causes degenerative effects or becomes irreversible.

1. Learning new things and actively using your memory to do things with the information you learn has been shown to cause brains to add new cells and add inter-connections to the brain neurons in people from babies to older senior citizens. (It also helps that the more this creates internet-like networks in your brain the more sections of that network you can lose without losing function.)

So you get a double by doing things like following the news; reading more new things and in more depth in fields that interest you; meeting new people; learning new skills; going new places; learning new languages; and finding many new things of interest to learn. (Having frequent conversations with people you know also works, it’s been found.) You keep more of your brain intact or add to it; and you can lose more of it without it causing problems!

2. Research has shown that people who do regular exercise sufficient to keep up good circulation to the brain also release the nerve and brain cell growth factor BDNF.

And, we also have proof this builds new brain cells. People who do no exercise at all have been found to have brain shrinkage while people who exercise do not.

3. Vigorous exercise, particularly interval cardio, or regular moderate activity plus eating right have been shown to maintain blood circulation to your brain. The better blood circulation to your brain is the less of your nerve cells will die or fail to be replaced– and better blood circulation to your brain prevents “vascular dementia” also.

4. Vigorous exercise, particularly interval cardio & strength training, or regular moderate activity, plus eating right -- especially NOT ingesting many sugars or any refined grains, have been shown to prevent too high blood sugar which destroys circulation by harming the surface of your blood vessels and your capillaries. Not only does avoiding this avoid poor circulation to your brain, there is separate evidence that avoiding too high levels of blood sugar tends to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

5. There are two also ways that nerves are destroyed that are also preventable or partially preventable. If you avoid them, you avoid the brain shrinkage they can cause.

MS and some other autoimmune diseases destroy the Myelin sheaths around your nerves and B-12 deficiency damages them. When this damage happens, the nerve stops passing on messages and dies either from lack of use or from direct structural damage.

a) But even if you have digestive problems or tend not to eat the animal protein foods that have B12, you can take daily or twice daily 1,000 mcg sublingual B12 supplements to prevent this. In fact, some studies have found partial reversal of memory problems in older people from this B12 supplementation.

b) Also, we posted on the recent study that found that taking at least 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 prevented something like half of all cases of autoimmune disease (& cancers.)

In fact, there is some direct evidence getting a robust intake of vitamin D3 from this or moderate but daily sun exposure tends to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

6. That’s in addition, to the information that eating curries that contain turmeric on your food every week and taking curcumin supplements from turmeric daily tends to prevent the damage of the process that causes Alzheimer’s disease. It apparently prevents the damage or cleans it up before it harms nearby neurons or both.

Since doing this also lowers inflammation and helps prevent heart disease and cancer AND slows aging, eating curries that include turmeric and taking curcumin look to be very good things to do!

I think preventing Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of mental decline is more useful than trying to treat it after the fact. I like that this study suggests some methods to prevent mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease.

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