Your Mind Is A Muscle

Continuing our discussion about Alzheimer’s disease, we are going to ask: who does it happen to? The huge majority of victims are over 65 years old. In fact it is considered an age-related dementia. It seems like women are in a preponderance of 16% to 11% over age 71. But you have to remember those are statistics. They may not reveal the whole truth because we know that women live longer than men and this is an age-related disease. If you take out the fact that women may live longer, at a given age the percentages are pretty close to equal.

Again, there are only a few things very definable about this disease. One of those is that we know for a fact that more educated people don’t’ get the disease at the same rate. For instance, if you have 12 years of education or less as opposed to someone with 15 years of education you have a 35% greater risk. That’s huge. It harkens back to the saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” And we also know that staying active with your mind will help delay onset of dementia.

Race also is a factor in that African-Americans tend to have Alzheimer’s more than Caucasians, but when you take out the education factor then it becomes pretty equivalent again. Just about the only statistic that really matters is education and how much you use your brain over the years. That’s the take-home message there if you are still younger.

There are a number of drugs out there to treat Alzheimer’s, and needless to say they are all very, very expensive drugs. None of them have been shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s or to change the ultimate outcome, though they may help for a few months. Of all the meta-analysis studies (meta-analysis is when you go back and study all the Alzheimer’s studies and what different people were on and took and tried, whether they were living in the Bahamas or North America, what kind of water they drank or what kind of toothpaste or whatever) the thing that pops out is it seems the people who have taken Advil-type preparations, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (that’s what we call that group of medicines as a general rule) have delayed onset of dementia as a whole more than those that don’t take non-steroidals. It seems like people who are always taking this for their arthritis or whatever, and take it on a continual basis for a number of years don’t get Alzheimer’s at the same rate as the general population.

If there is a drug that can help you with your Alzheimer’s I would go and put my money on a $2 bottle of generic ibuprofen rather than a $20 - $30 a pill drugs that big Pharma has come out with. More is not better here. New is not better than old.

Stress, of course, is always a factor in disease. Stress is the cause of disease. Certainly stress causes cortisol release, causes all the growth hormone to go down, all of the good things to go down and all the bad things to go up. So you’ve just got to figure that in here some place, although they really haven’t done any honest studies on that.

Alzheimer’s is intriguing. It’s a little bit fearful and concerning to us, especially as we get older toward that magic number of 65. Take your Advil, stay out of stress and keep studying. Keep learning, keep growing as a person.