Lifestyle

Dietary supplements make up a ubiquitous, $40 billion industry. Some of the 50,000 different types of supplements out there claim to improve your mood, energy, vitamin levels and overall health. And some supplements, like Prevagen, bank on the population of people living with dementia or Alzheimer’s.

Exercise has long been known to provide a wealth of health benefits, both physical and mental. But a new study suggests that exercise can boost mental cognition immediately following the session.

High blood pressure is linked to a lot of common health problems, most notably stroke and heart disease. Scientists have also established a link between high blood pressure and increased dementia risk. But a new study finds that an uptick in blood pressure — even as early as your 30s — could lead to a higher dementia risk later on.

In a nationwide study, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of hundreds of participants in the National Institutes of Health’s Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT) and found that intensively controlling a person’s blood pressure was more effective at slowing the accumulation of white matter lesions than standard treatment of high blood pressure. The results complement a previous study published by the same research group which showed that intensive treatment significantly lowered the chances that participants developed mild cognitive impairment.

Following a healthy lifestyle is associated with a lower risk of dementia in cognitively healthy older adults at varying levels of genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, according to a study published online July 14 in JAMA. Funded in part by NIA, the study is the first to examine the relationship between multiple genetic risk factors for dementia and multiple lifestyle factors.