As we reach our forties and fifties, we start to notice a few changes with our brain. We forget things more easily, we experience more “tip of the tongue moments” and find it harder to stay focused or on task. We put it down to the fact that our speed of mental processing is slowing down. We may even have a couple of fleeting worrying thoughts that our brain might be showing the first signs of actual cognitive decline.

One of the biggest fears people express about ageing, is the loss of our mental faculties. That loss of that of course, has a significant impact on our ability to remain self-caring and independent.

Until now, the onset of actual cognitive decline has been thought to occur in our sixties. The clinical onset of Alzheimer’s disease typically occurs around age 65 or older, although it is well recognized that the actual condition slowly and silently develops over the preceding couple of decades. Brain scans can now show the pathological changes in younger brains, before the clinical signs of disease.
Those showing the greatest amount of pathological change in their brains are also known to be at greatest risk of developing clinical signs of dementia in later life.

Findings from a couple of studies (including a longitudinal study from Seattle, which has been following a group of 500 individuals since 1956) have suggested that cognitive decline did not start before the age of 60.
Those findings have now been challenged by a new study recently published in the British Medical Journal which has found that the age of onset of cognitive decline may be significantly earlier than previously thought: actually starting in our mid forties.

This study of 10308 men and women civil servants aged 45 to 70 years from London UK was set up to examine whether different age groups showed differing levels of cognitive decline over a ten-year period. The group underwent tests of memory, reasoning, vocabulary, phonemic and semantic fluency in three different assessments over the ten-year period.

The results of the study showed the following:

Between the age of 65 and 70, men on average showed a -9.6% decline in cognition,
women -7.4%. This was not unexpected.

However results of the younger age group age 45 to 49 also showed evidence of cognitive decline, albeit at a lower percentage; -3.5% cognitive decline for men and -3.6% for women.

The implications of this study suggest that we need to be taking a much closer note of how we are performing in midlife. Along with midlife obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, our midlife cognitive function appears to be very important in determining how we will fare as we age.

If cognitive decline is picked up in our midlife, then at least that provides some valuable time to be putting into place specific strategies to to minimize any further decline and attempt to build cognitive reserve. What we don’t know (and requires further study) is whether midlife cognitive decline will lead to actual dementia – however it would seem prudent to do whatever we can, to keep our brains intact.

So what is the best thing we need to be doing in our midlife?

It’s all about maintain and improving brain function by adopting brain healthy lifestyles:

Eat healthily with a wide variety of green vegetables, fruit, lean proteins, seeds and nuts and keeping away from pies, pasties, cakes and biscuits, hot chips and fried foods.

Maintain a positive attitude to life. Being social engaged and active helps to keep stress levels down and stave off anxiety and depression.

Use your brain to learn new skills. Aim to include mental activities every day that are outside our usual habits. Card games, Sudoku, brain games, and apps are all useful.

Move your body. One of the biggest things we can do for our brain is to ensure we spend a minimum of thirty minutes every day doing some form of physical exercise – enough to get the heart rate up.

So next time you have a memory lapse, forget an appointment or lose your keys while it might simply a slower speed of processing, it could be an indication of a more serious reduction in your cognitive ability. So rather than ignoring it, be proactive and take the time every day to help restore your mental sharpness. Your brain may depend on it.

Ref:

Singh-Manoux,A.et al Timing of onset of cognitive decline: results from Whitehall 11 prospective cohort study. British Medical Journal 2012; 344 doi: 10.1136/bmj.d7622

I have always admired others who have the ability to speak more than one language fluently. My memories of being taught French and German at school are hazy to say the least.
We were out having dinner with friends recently when it was casually mentioned that a particular friend could speak four languages well. When we commented on how impressed we were, he responded saying. “Well that’s nothing, my wife can speak six!”
They are a truly multilingual family. Born in Switzerland and South Africa, now residing in Australia, they have managed to maintain their verbal fluency by using different languages depending on what is being discussed and whether they think you might understand some of what they are saying! Not surprisingly, their children all have the same ease of slipping into French and German when sitting around the dinner table.

You may be asking, so what?

Well apart from being really useful when travelling overseas and impressing one’s friends, it appears that being bilingual helps to contribute to our cognitive reserve.

Having the ability to speak two languages consistently over the years has been shown in a study to delay the apparent onset of dementia by up to five years.

It’s not that being bilingual prevents Alzheimer’s or dementia. It’s more that having the brain deal with two sets of vocabulary, grammar etc allows it to defer the clinical manifestation of memory loss, confusion, and difficulty with problem solving and planning.

The Canadian study looked at 211 people with probable Alzheimer’s disease over a two-year period. The date of diagnosis and age of onset of cognitive decline was recorded along with information about occupation, education and language history. From this, 102 people were classified as bilingual and 109 as monolingual.
(In Canada, many of the population speak English, French or both.)

The researchers found that those who were bilingual were on average diagnosed with Alzheimer’s around 4.3 years later than those who were monolingual.
There was no difference relating to gender, immigration, cognition or occupational level.

This study supports how our lifestyle plays a very important role in how our brain copes with age related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s.

Perhaps this provides us with a golden opportunity to brush off our dusty language books, sign up to learn a new language at college or on-line and book that next holiday so we can practise our new found skills.

Which one are you going to learn first?

Reference:
Fergus I.M. Craik, Ellen Bialystok, Morris Freedman. Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease: Bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve. Neurology, 2010; 75: 1726-1729 DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0b013e3181fc2a1c

The statistics for the numbers of people expected to develop dementia and Alzheimer’s over the next 40 years are really quite frightening.

Starting with a 5 % risk at the age of 65, this then doubles every five years. By the time we reach 85, up to 50% of us are likely to have developed dementia.

I don’t know about you but I’m not very happy with that statistic!

And what will become of us who actually live even longer?

Over the next twenty years our lifespans are forecast to increase even further, what will the relative risks be then?

The good news is that neuroscience has now provided us with many new insights and information about how our mind works. This includes the fact that it is our choices of how we live our lives, our lifestyles that can make a fundamental difference to the outcome of our future brain health.

If you have a positive family history of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, this does elevate your risk for developing it yourself.

BUT and it’s a really big but, genetics only accounts for 20 to 30% of the factors contributing to determining our lifespan. It is our lifestyle choices and environment that determine the other 70 to 80%.

Guess what folks.

It’s up to us to decide what do we want for ourselves as we get older and to put in place the necessary choices to enable us to get what we want.

In my presentation, “All Your Marbles” I speak about the four key areas that are essential to include in any brain training program when looking to improve your mind in terms of memory, focus and attention.

To make it easy to remember all four areas, I came up with the acronym N.A.M.E .

N. stands for Nutrition.

A. stands for Attitude and Stress management.

M. stands for Mental Training.

E. stands for Exercise.

Each of these four areas is complimentary and synergistic with the others.

In order to build up your brain or cognitive reserve which will help protect us from cognitive decline, each requires the others to provide the full benefit.

It’s a multi-pronged approach.

There is heaps of information available to us that many of us know would make a difference to our overall health and well-being.

The question is “Why aren’t we doing the things we know are important?”

“What is it that keeps us deferring taking action?”

We have to look inside and be honest with ourselves.

Only you can answer what it is that might be stopping you from choosing those super brain foods and including them in your diet.

You may have been thinking about starting a new exercise plan but haven’t gotten round to it.

There could be a number of thing you have always wanted to do, such as learn to play the trumpet, do Italian cooking or visit long distance friends or family in other countries. What has stopped you from doing these?

And what about those things that wear you down, the worries and the stress you deal with. How are you managing those?

Remember, we all have the capacity to play a big role in determining our future brain health.

It is possible, through a combination of eating really healthily, exercising adequately, stimulating and stretching our mind and managing our stress that we can maintain our brain.

It’s all in the N.A.M.E.