How to prevent dementia?

Worldwide, around 30 million people suffer from dementia. And by 2050 this number is will be triple. However, many cases of dementia can be prevented by simple rules of life.

Ever more clearly becoming that certain lifestyle significantly affect on the risk of dementia. The large studies have shown that people who are overweight, have high blood pressure, smoking, more frequently suffer from an Alzheimer’s disease. However, these figures were not clearly substantiate as the individual lifestyle factors. Many risk factors, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes, go hand in hand, and therefore their impact cannot be clearly separated. British and American researchers have now believe that the most important factors in the risk of dementia development are lifestyle.

Movement is particularly important for the prevention of dementia.

Overall, therefore, exist seven risk factors – low education, smoking, low physical activity, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and depression – about 50 percent of all dementias. Every second case of dementia could be prevented by a healthy lifestyle. The relationship between them mitigated by the fact that factors such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity are related.

Among the risk factors, in the western industrialized nations, lack of exercise is the most important. The main reason is that here especially many people move too little and this risk factor has a particularly great impact. After physical inactivity follow smoking, low education and depression as the causes of dementia. The importance of diabetes, hypertension and obesity, as a factor, are quite low. And as more sports usually also means less overweight, better blood sugar levels and lower blood pressure, here is indeed a great potential for reducing the risk of dementia.