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A new report released last week by the Alzheimer’s Association puts numbers on something most of us already feel—and maybe even fear:
- First off, 7.4 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease. The lifetime risk at age 45 is 1 in 5 for women and 1 in 10 for men.
- Second, in a nationwide survey of more than 3,800 adults ages 40 and older conducted alongside the report, more than two-thirds said they actively worry about developing Alzheimer’s or another dementia—while 99 percent said they believe maintaining brain health is at least as important as physical health.
- Third, only 9 percent of those surveyed said they actually know a lot about how to maintain brain health.
That gap — nearly universal concern, almost no one knowing what to do about it — is exactly what a new study out of Rush University Medical Center set out to address.
What they studied
Researchers followed 1,939 adults with an average age of 80, none of whom had dementia at the start, for about eight years.
Their goal was to measure something they called “cognitive enrichment” — how mentally stimulating your life has been across an entire lifetime.
They broke it into three stages.
- Early life, before age 18: At this stage they wanted to figure out how often participants had been read to, whether books and newspapers were in their homes, and whether they studied foreign languages for more than five years.
- Middle age, around 40: Here, they looked at income level, access to resources like magazine subscriptions and library cards, and how often participants had visited museums or libraries.
- Later life, around 80: Now, they were looking at the degree to which participants spent their time reading, writing, and playing games, along with retirement income and financial resources.
Each participant got an enrichment score, and then the researchers watched what happened.
The numbers
Over the course of the study, 551 participants developed Alzheimer’s and 719 developed mild cognitive impairment.
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