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How to Stop the Stealth of Dementia
Overview
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Dementia is a lifestyle disease that is on the rise, and although it is projected to triple by 2050, some experts believe this is an underestimate.
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Dementia does not just rob people of past pleasures locked away in memory but also from planning and building a future founded on new adventures and those new experiences needed for life to continue to grow.
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Learning to love and care about the unity of our body and mind, our relationship with family, other loved ones, friends, neighbors, all humanity, and other living beings is essential to developing a healthy, happy, anti-dementia lifestyle.
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Love makes us bold and daring in our battle to live a life full of rewarding and memorable experiences that we will not allow dementia to steal from us.
The Cruelest of Maladies
My mother was a remarkable woman. In her fifties, after raising eight children, she went to college, completed her degree, became an award-winning artist, wrote two books, and, being fluent in English, Spanish, and French, spent a summer residing among the residents of Arcachon, France capped off with a week touring Spain. At the time of her induction into the Triton College Alumni Hall of Fame, she was 99 and had no recollection of the accomplishments for which she was being recognized; dementia stole them from her. All maladies are cruel but none like dementia.
Dementia Rising
Like cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and cancers, dementia is a lifestyle disease that often goes unnoticed, slowly festering for years before a person experiences symptoms. Unlike recent declines in CVD
and cancers,
dementia more than doubled between 1990 and 2019
and is predicted to triple by 2050.
Sadly, this may be an underestimate as the global rate of dementia is significantly higher among young people (30-64 years) than previously thought.
Moreover, once diagnosed with dementia, it is too late; there is no effective treatment for dementia.
With dementia rising and treatments lacking, it is of the utmost urgency that we capitalize on the preventive benefits of learning a lifestyle that enhances the self’s sense of unity, continuity, and meaningfulness.
The Life of the Self
Heinz Kohut
defines the self as our sense that our body and mind form a unity in space, a continuum in time, and a meaningful center of action initiatives. Maintaining the unity and continuity of our life, the self works with our brain to store memories in unconsciousness and upload stored memories to consciousness to solve new problems, form new memories, or just remind us who we are. Despite physical, attitudinal, psychological, and other changes over our lifetime, the self’s memories give continuity to our life. Dementia is psychological vivisection; while the body is still alive, dementia dismembers the memories that hold the life of the self together.
Dementia flies under the radar of our senses. When memories are amputated from the self, there is no immediate and sharp pain as when a limb is injured or lost; when dementia severs the continuity of life and steals precious memories from people, there is no grieving accompanying the loss.
Dementia mocks the self, leaving the body’s long-term memories intact as it renders the mind incapable of naming a familiar object or solving a simple problem.
Love in the Time of Dementia
Success in love is a prerequisite to success in life,
including a life without dementia. Love makes us bold and daring. When committed to caring for another person, the environment, or the precious unity of our self, body, and mind, the action-initiating power radiates from the self, the “nuclear core” of our unity, and assertively begins exploring, experimenting, and discovering ways to live a life that is truly vital.
The Five Horsemen of Memory and the Life of the Self
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Healthy Environments:
Exposure to smog and air pollution is likely the most difficult dementia risk factor for us to control. There is no safe threshold for breathing polluted air.
Regardless of age, air pollution takes a toll on the brain. Chronic exposure to high amounts of air pollution is linked to the development of dementia in adults
and the build-up of proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease in the brains of children and infants as young as 11 months.
Measures to reduce exposure to air pollution and thereby lower the risk of all-cause dementia
include:
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Petition policymakers to mandate clean air policies. Live in locations with low levels of air pollution,
in homes more than 50 meters (164 feet) away from major highways, and wear a mask when air quality is poor.
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Social Relationships:
Loneliness is a slow and meticulous killer,
often taking the life of the self
before it takes the life of the body. Although the physiological mechanism underlying how loneliness damages the brain are not well understood,
the emotional damage to the self is apparent. Loneliness clogs the arteries of love, stopping the vital flow of caring interactions between self and others. Here are some simple suggestions to keep love flowing.
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Just say “hi.”
Even if it is with a smile and the glance of an eye.
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Use your head: Think about it and look for opportunities to relate to others in a caring way. Even quickies, those immediate short-term positive exchanges with the cashier at the coffeehouse, a stranger in the elevator, a co-worker, or even a significant other, can make all parties feel like we are not meaningless human-has-beens but living, loved, and loving human beings.
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Good Nourishment:
Dementia is associated with the consumption of pro-inflammatory, highly processed foods.
Between 1999 and 2018, the consumption of ultra-processed foods among youths (2-19 years of age) increased as their consumption of healthier foods decreased
(likely contributing to the unexpected increase in dementia among younger individuals).
Before junk food destroys the brain and body, our food environment psychologically cultivates “Mindless Eating”
and is supported by technology that processes food to maximize the brain’s pleasure centers.
Consequently, our food environment often makes us (the self) insensitive and indifferent to the unity of our body and brain. Here are some suggestions to repossess and strengthen the self’s assertive power over the food environment.
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Develop a mindful approach to eating by creating and following a weekly meal plan.
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Become aware of how different foods produce varied feelings in mood and body. Eat healthier. The good feeling that comes from eating healthy goes beyond the taste buds and endures over time.
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Give the brain the “boon of sleep”
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Mid-life sleep disorders increase the risk of dementia later in life.
For individuals over 60, maintaining regular sleep patterns becomes particularly difficult and negatively impacts memory.
Here are some healthy sleep recommendations set forth by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute:
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Stick to a sleep schedule—even on the weekends.
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Avoid:
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Exercising 2–3 hours before bedtime.
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Stimulants: Caffeinated drinks and foods, as well as nicotine.
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Alcoholic beverages before bed.
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Large meals late at night.
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Drinking too many fluids at night.
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Medicines that delay or disrupt sleep, if possible.
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Naps after 3 p.m.
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Exercise: The “vis medicatrix naturae”:
The wholeness power of exercise begins with the demands it places on the self, body, and brain to unite and work together.
Wholeness dictates that there is no brain health without the health of the self, body, and mind.
Thus, it is no coincidence that cardiovascular
and muscular fitness
are associated with brain fitness. Here are some suggestions for developing an active, wholeness lifestyle.
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Safety first: If it has been a while, check with your doctor before starting an exercise program.
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Develop the self’s action-initiating power by exerting it to overcome the common initial resistance to exercise.
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Know thyself: Exercise is self-education. Mindfulness matters for maintaining and enhancing self-body unity while exercising.
Call to Action
A major difference between a healthy and unhealthy lifestyle is the role of the self as the center initiating actions that maintain and enhance the continuity of our body, brain, and mind unity. To learn more about developing a lifestyle that preserves the unity and continuity of life, contact Dr. Stephen J. Almada.
Stephen J Almada, Ed.D. Health Psychologist and author of Exercise, Life, and Love: The Making of a Sedentary Society. www.hsichicago.org.
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Kohut, H. (1977). The restoration of the self. The statement is based on Kohut’s experience analyzing his patients and the process that leads to the establishment of a “core” or “nuclear self,” which he goes on to describe as “the basis for our sense of being an independent center of initiative and perception, integrated with our most central ambitions and ideals and with our experience that our body and mind form a unit in space and continuum in time” (p. 177).
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I am referring to embodied knowledge described by Shogo Tanaka as “a type of knowledge where the body knows how to act” (Tanaka, S. (2011). The notion of embodied knowledge. Theoretical psychology: Global transformations and challenges, 149-157). Learning how to ride a bike or any other physical skill results in the body knowing how to ride without the self’s conscious efforts needed during the learning process. Thus, like all knowledge, embodied knowledge results in a heightened efficiency in terms of the mental and physical work required to perform the skill versus learning the skill. It is the depth of embodied knowledge (i.e., every cell, muscle, and other tissue and organ in the body knows what to do and how to work with one another) that is unaffected by dementia, as is shown in https://www.npr.org/2020/11/10/933387878/struck-with-memory-loss-a-dancer-remembers-swan-lake-but-who-is-she.
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As a freshman in college, I heard a lecture on love by a psychologist, Dr. Murray Banks. The one thing I have never forgotten from that lecture was when he stated it did not matter if one was a genius in geometry or the physiology of a fruit fly; if “you fail at love, you fail at life.” Later, I studied the work of the psychologist Harry Harlow and his controversial study of baby monkeys he took away from their mothers. At the end of his career, when asked what he learned from his research, he responded: Before we can learn to live, we have to learn how to love.
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Underwood, E. (2017). The polluted brain. Science, 355(632327), 342-345.
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Fu, P., & Yung, K. K. L. (2020). Air pollution and Alzheimer’s disease: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 77(2), 701-714.
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Improving air quality reduces dementia risk, multiple studies suggest. Press release: Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. Denver, July 26, 2021.
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Yuchi, W., Sbihi, H., Davies, H., Tamburic, L., & Brauer, M. (2020). Road proximity, air pollution, noise, green space and neurologic disease incidence: a population-based cohort study. Environmental Health, 19(1), 1-15.
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Rico-Uribe, L. A., Caballero, F. F., Martín-María, N., Cabello, M., Ayuso-Mateos, J. L., & Miret, M. (2018). Association of loneliness with all-cause mortality: A meta-analysis. PloS one, 13(1), e0190033. Lennartsson, C., Rehnberg, J., & Dahlberg, L. (2022). The association between loneliness, social isolation and all-cause mortality in a nationally representative sample of older women and men. Aging & Mental Health, 26(9), 1821-1828.
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Sommerlad, A., Sabia, S., Singh-Manoux, A., Lewis, G., & Livingston, G. (2019). Association of social contact with dementia and cognition: 28-year follow-up of the Whitehall II cohort study. PLoS medicine, 16(8), e1002862.
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Colino, S. How Loneliness Affects Health. Brain and life newsletter. October/November 2020, https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/how-loneliness-affects-health#:~:text=%22Loneliness%20can%20change%20the%20neurochemistry,and%20neurosurgery%20at%20Duke%20University.
18
Sommers, S. The Power of Hello. Psychology today, March 6, 2012. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-of-small-talk/201203/the-power-of-hello
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Wesselmann, E. D., Cardoso, F. D., Slater, S., & Williams, K. D. (2012). To be looked at as though air: civil attention matters. Psychological science, 23(2), 166–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611427921.
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van Lent, D. M., Himali, J. J., Gokingco, H., Aparicio, H. J., Gonzales, M. M., Salinas, J., … & Jacob, M. E. (2021). Higher dietary inflammatory index scores are associated with increased incidence of all‐cause dementia in the Framingham Heart Study. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 17, e055364.
21
Wang, L., Steele, E. M., Du, M., Pomeranz, J. L., O’Connor, L. E., Herrick, K. A., … & Zhang, F. F. (2021). Trends in consumption of ultra processed foods among US youths aged 2-19 years, 1999-2018. Jama, 326(6), 519-530.
22
Wansink, B. (2010). Mindless eating: Why we eat more than we think. Bantam. Chang, C. H. (2021). Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think: By Brian Wansink, 2011, London: Hay House. ISBN: 0345526880.
23
Moss, M. (2013). Salt, sugar, fat: How the food giants hooked us. Random House.
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The “boon of sleep” is a phrase used by Homer in The Odyssey. It captures the restorative and regenerative benefits that come with a good night of sleep.
25
Sindi, S., Kåreholt, I., Johansson, L., Skoog, J., Sjöberg, L., Wang, H. X., … & Kivipelto, M. (2018). Sleep disturbances and dementia risk: a multicenter study. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 14(10), 1235-1242.
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Irwin, M. R., & Vitiello, M. V. (2019). Implications of sleep disturbance and inflammation for Alzheimer’s disease dementia. The Lancet Neurology, 18(3), 296-306.
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Your Guide to Healthy Sleep. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/resources/your-guide-healthy-sleep.
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Vis medicatrix naturae is the healing power of nature, a concept attributed to Hippocrates, and seems to have been lost in modern times. It is noteworthy that Hippocrates not only saw disease as suffering (pathos) but also as toil (ponos), meaning the body works to make itself healthy or whole and not just when suffering. Exercise, good nourishment, and good sleep constitute a good part of the work of life.
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Pedersen, B. K. (2019). Physical activity and muscle–brain crosstalk. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 15(7), 383-392.
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Pinho, R. A., Aguiar, A. S., Jr, & Radák, Z. (2019). Effects of Resistance Exercise on Cerebral Redox Regulation and Cognition: An Interplay Between Muscle and Brain. Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland), 8(11), 529. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox8110529.
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Tarumi, T., & Zhang, R. (2015). The Role of Exercise-Induced Cardiovascular Adaptation in Brain Health. Exercise and sport sciences reviews, 43(4), 181–189. https://doi.org/10.1249/JES.0000000000000063.
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