Boomers and the Alzheimer's Crisis Part Two: Preventing Alzheimer's Disease
Brain aging and brain health were gaining attention in the mid-2000s. I was starting to experience some brain glitches during that time, and it scared me! At a conference on aging in 2006, I visited a booth by Posit Science. They had research to support that you could stop brain aging losses by living a brain-healthy lifestyle. The conference started me on a multiyear quest to learn everything I could about brain aging and brain health. Throughout those years we never said that a brain-healthy lifestyle could prevent Alzheimer’s and dementia. But I thought I had found the fountain of youth. There was something I could do to create an ageless brain! What I was learning convinced me that we could maintain a high-functioning brain until the day we died. Even though we couldn’t say that this lifestyle could prevent Alzheimer’s, we could say that it could delay the onset.
I believed boomers would be as excited about this discovery as I was. To my surprise, no one took me seriously. At the time it seemed like the people I talked to didn’t believe they would ever get dementia! So, I started the My Boomer Brain blog and created my education platform about what was happening to our boomer brains and what we could do to reverse these changes. Besides the blogs, I developed programs to teach anyone who would listen what brain aging losses did to older brains and delivered presentations on the brain-healthy lifestyle. The problem at that time was that the research hadn’t captured definitive results that lifestyle was largely responsible for developing dementia. The connection wasn’t there yet.
I presented brain aging and brain health to a lot of groups over the years. The urgency to adopt the information just wasn’t there. However, over the past few years, brain aging, and brain health have become very hot topics. There is good research to support the value of living a brain-healthy lifestyle and hopefully prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. On 04/08/2024 an article ran in the Wall Street Journal: “What Middle-Aged People Can Do Now to Help Prevent Dementia Later.” This article is streaming on several different news services. I am very excited that the information is being directed toward 40 and 50-year-olds because that is the best time to recover brain losses and incorporate continual practices to increase brain volume.
Boomers have been left out of this scenario. If you remember in Part One – the boomers will be the primary reason that the incidence and prevalence of Alzheimer’s will double by 2050 because of the sheer size of the group. The brain-healthy lifestyle is a viable solution for delaying or preventing Alzheimer’s disease. Our brain doesn’t know how old we are, it ages by the lifestyle that we live. We can change our brains no matter what our chronological age is. There are greater losses to recover when we are older, but living this lifestyle will improve our physical health, mental health and build cognitive reserve. It is never too late to change your brain. Instead of writing off the boomers as the reason for a healthcare crisis, more attention must be directed toward educating and helping them to create a brain for the ages.
In recognition of this, I have written a book. ‘The Boomer Brain’ starts with the science of how we can change our brain; examples of real boomers recovering from brain events; the PLAN to live a brain-healthy lifestyle; and ways to get you started without upending your life. We don’t need to become a statistic for Alzheimer’s.
The release of The Boomer Brain on Amazon is very close. Feel free to message me or send me your email if you want the first notification of the release date.
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