WASHINGTON, D.C.: Amid gloomy reports of an impending epidemic of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, emerging research offers a promising twist. Recent studies in North America, the U.K. and Europe suggest that dementia risk among seniors in some high-income countries has dropped steadily over the past 25 years. If the trend is driven by midlife factors such as building “brain reserve” and maintaining heart health, as some experts suspect, this could lend credence to staying mentally engaged and taking cholesterol-lowering drugs as preventive measures.
At first glance, the overall message seems somewhat confusing. Higher life expectancy and falling birth rates are driving up the global elderly population. “And if there are more 85-year-olds, it’s almost certain there will be more cases of age-related diseases,” says Ken Langa, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan. According to the World Alzheimer Report 2015, 46.8 million people around the globe suffered from dementia last year, and that number is expected to double every 20 years.
Looking more closely, though, new epidemiological studies reveal a surprisingly hopeful trend. Analyses conducted over the last decade in the U.S., Canada, England, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark suggest that “a 75- to 85-year-old has a lower risk of having Alzheimer’s today than 15 or 20 years ago,” says Langa, who discussed the research on falling dementia rates in a 2015 Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy commentary….