My name is Craig Ritchie and I'm Professor of Psychiatry of Ageing at the
University of Edinburgh, and also direct the Centre for Dementia Prevention there.
What I really wanted to get over was that preventing dementia was really
within our grasp. It might actually be the case already that with
enjoying better cardiovascular health, better reduced heart disease
we're seeing a reduction in amount of people living with dementia or the
number of people getting new diagnoses of dementia already in many parts of the
world, so what I was trying to convey today was that with even more effort we
can make a massive impact on the number of people getting dementia.
It's never really too early to start thinking about brain health in terms of where you are in
life so setting patterns of behaviour around exercise and diet when you're a
child or young adult is really important because what we're really beginning to learn is
that there's probably critical periods when certain things
will be of either risk to your brain or benefit to your brain and a lot of those
things are actually taking place before you reach old age, as in midlife and an
earlier life, but I think at the end of the day that the brain works really well
if it's got a good blood flow and it's got good nutrients coming into it.
So anything that is good for your heart it's good for your head because that
increases the blood flow and also making sure that you have a good diet so you
have the right nutrients going into the brain. So what's good for your heart,
not being overweight, not smoking, not drinking to excess, these things are all
really important for brain health as well. Probably what's more specific
around brain health is kind of what we're doing now - getting into conversations,
being socially active, because that really lights up the brain
so being with friends, being involved in sporting activities,
doing hobbies, these types of things and that's probably something that in retirement
people should really focus on - how they can maintain that social activity
because that's probably gonna be really important in terms of maintaining brain
health and therefore preventing dementia.
There's only so much that an individual can do their own bat.
They need to have the places to go, so I think a lot of what we do and
provide, let's take, say, a golf club for instance - they're set up for
people who play golf. It sounds obvious doesn't it? But if you're getting into
retirement and you're maybe not playing golf too well, I've had a lot of patients
or people say they start getting excluded because they're not playing
golf very well, they're slow, they're holding up all the other people, so you have
to look at maybe those golf clubs recognizing this and say what can we
actually do other things around the club which encourages our members still to
stay involved in the club and the social activity without necessarily having to
play such a great round of golf anymore? I think the availability of
things where people can be socially active and interactive is really
critical and I think what we've got to do as a society is actually look at ways
of developing clubs, societies, settings where people with the earliest
stages of dementia can still be fully integrated
and the activities, or whatever is going around about, include them and were inclusive
rather than a excluding them.
The one thing I always suggest is that if people have been crossword fans,
Sudoku fans their whole life, doing more of the same isn't as
stimulating. They're doing something new. I joke sometimes that I don't play
any musical instrument at all. I'm holding off on learning until I retire
because I think if I turn 60-65 and then start picking up a
guitar, or playing the piano, the cognitive challenges of learning to play
an instrument will probably be really good therapeutically to maintain brain
health, so yeah do the Sudoku, do the crossword, but see if you can do new things
new learnings or any new activities. That's going to be the most sort of protective,
if you like, for your brain.