Would You Want to Know Your Odds of Getting Dementia? Suppose a simple test could give you a hint of your risk of developing dementia in years ahead. If you were found to be at high risk, would you change some habits known to affect that risk? Perhaps stop drinking, or eat better, or start exercising?
Such a test has been, well, tested, and it seems to work pretty well, at least in a new study involving 4,164 people who were 59 years old on average.
I happen to be 59, and to be frank, the risk of dementia has been on my mind for several years now. I’m not sure I want to know my actual risk level, but like anyone, I sometimes walk into a room and can’t remember why. I’m always looking for my keys. Those are normal miscues of the mind, the experts say, so it’s hard to know when to start worrying. What I do know is that I took great interest in the new research, detailed online last month by the journal Neurology.
The findings don’t prove the test predicts dementia, the scientists stress. But the results do show an association that mirrors other evidence that lifestyle factors can indeed predict declining cognitive abilities related to dementia — in some cases decades before symptoms are evident.
How the test works
The test scored people on 11 lifestyle factors linked to eventual cognitive decline, including high blood pressure, heart disease, smoking, poor diet, and lack of physical activity. Individuals were then placed into one of three dementia risk groups: low risk, medium risk, and high risk.
The participants also took cognitive tests to measure memory, information-processing ability, attention, and speed of decision-making. Finally, their brains were scanned.
The results:
- People who were at high risk on the lifestyle-factors test scored lower than the other groups on attention, information processing speed, and executive function (things like mental flexibility, self-control, and working memory).
- They also had more lesions on their brains — a potential sign of dementia in the development stage.
- Men in the high-risk group (but not women, for reasons unclear) also had lower volume of gray matter in their brains — another sign of brain deterioration — and also scored lower on other memory tests.
“Dementia risk scores might be useful to help identify people at higher risk of dementia earlier, so that potential lifestyle factors can be addressed earlier and monitored more closely,” says study team member Sebastian Köhler, PhD of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “Our study found that a substantial proportion of brain changes might be attributable to risk factors that can be modified.”
Dementia signs can show up in midlife
Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, affects more than six million Americans over age 65 and more than 50 million people around the world. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, though less common, can start before age 40. There’s no known cure for dementia.
Countless other people suffer a lesser condition called mild cognitive impairment, “a slight but noticeable change in thinking and memory skills” that sometimes, but not always, leads to dementia, according to Harvard researchers.
Much research has established pretty strongly that many of our bad habits contribute to the gradual development of mild cognitive impairment and dementia, starting much sooner than you might think, with effects that are measurable by science but often unnoticed early on by those affected. While heredity plays a role, such serious deterioration of the brain is not inevitable, experts say.
While you can’t take the dementia test yourself just yet, the new research suggests a useful future tool for identifying an individual’s risk.
In a 2018 study that monitored people across 16 years, the test, called Lifestyle for Brain Health (LIBRA), was found to have similar predictive potential. And in a 2019 study, poor LIBRA scores in midlife were associated with higher odds of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in follow-ups done up to 30 years later.
“More research is needed to confirm these findings and determine why there were differences between men and women,” says Köhler, who was involved in the two previous LIBRA studies, too. “It’s exciting that a simple test score may indeed be an index of brain health. We need to learn whether people can improve their scores by making changes in their diet, increasing physical activity, or limiting alcohol to low- to moderate-use.”
