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While no one can promise a sure-fire treatment for memory care, there are strategies that can significantly improve your chances of keeping Alzheimer's at bay...Introducing: “How to Protect Your Memory and Brain Health”.

8 Key Strategies Focused on Saving Your Memory With Evidence-Based Research to Support Each Step

Dr. Peter V. Rabins is an acclaimed author and geriatric psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins - and one of the nation's leading experts on the care and management of patients with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

If someone told you there were eight straightforward steps you could take to dramatically enhance your quality of life and reduce or delay your chances for memory deterioration, what would you do?

Many experts believe that once you understand your various risk factors for cognitive decline, take control of them, and follow through with the evidence-based strategies detailed in How To Protect Your Memory and Brain Health, you'll be in a better position to keep your memory strong well into later life.

For example, do you know?

What's the best way to guard your memory and prevent dementia?

If you answered, stay heart healthy, you'd be right. And Dr. Rabins explains why with evidence from recent studies in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Controlling high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease are absolutely critical to cognitive function. Dr. Rabins explains how to take charge.

What are the effects of too little sleep on keeping your memory sharp?

Many of us have trouble sleeping at night. No big deal -- right? Now new studies show that getting adequate sleep plays an essential role in learning new information, relating to names, dates, faces, facts, specific events - in short forming memory.

What's so special about the Mediterranean diet?

For years the marketing and promotion of dietary supplements that claim to enhance memory have left many people confused and wary. Now recent evidence-based research reported in the Annals of Neurology suggests that people who closely follow the Mediterranean diet have a 40 percent lower risk of Alzheimer's disease. The take-away: The food you eat, not the pills, can prevent or slow the rate of cognitive decline.

How does regular physical activity protect memory and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's?

Studies investigating the exercise/memory/dementia link have shown positive outcomes in recent years. Dr. Rabins provides an in-depth look at a number of key studies to show you the benefits of regular exercise... and how to incorporate exercise into your schedule.

How does stress affect memory?

We all know that living a stress-filled life is unhealthy. Turns out stress is worse for us than we thought. Johns Hopkins researchers have linked high levels of the stress hormone cortisol with poor cognitive performance in older adults. And another study, reported in the journal Neurology, found that depressed and anxious people are 40 percent more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment. In this fascinating section, Dr. Rabins provides key "stress erasers" - proactive steps you can take to reduce the stress in your life.

Every day, scientists are proving that diminished memory and mental capacity are NOT inevitable - and can be slowed, halted or even reversed through good nutrition, lifestyle habits and more. Even Alzheimer's disease is not something that suddenly occurs in old age. Rather, it's a continuum of illnesses that gets its start decades earlier without any symptoms.

So it makes sense that if we could find a way to keep our brains healthier and better able to counter the damage that occurs with age, we could better the odds of preserving memory and preventing or forestalling Alzheimer's and other dementias.

A recent report from the National Institutes of Health supports this view. It provides evidence that vascular disease risk factors - including mid-life hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes - can all predispose someone to developing memory problems-even Alzheimer's.

While this may not sound like good news - it is.

Because it points the way to the importance of effective prevention strategies - strategies you can begin today to keep your brain healthier, longer.

Johns Hopkins Health Alerts

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Those daily activities and chores like folding the laundry may help keep dementia at bay.

New research finds that seniors who expended the most energy doing chores, running errands and simply going about their business were less likely to experience mental decline as they aged.

"All those things that you would never think of as exercise get our heart rate up and make our blood vessels pump blood," said study co-author Todd Manini, an assistant professor of aging and geriatric research at the University of Florida, Gainesville. " What this study is telling us is those other activities might also count for health benefits."

One of the challenges of the study was how challenging it is to keep track of chores and daily activities. So researchers measured how many calories people burned over the course of two weeks by having them drink a non-radioactive isotope -- basically, water that had been chemically altered slightly.

Participants, 200 older adults whose average age was 75, were divided into thirds based on how much energy they used daily, minus the amount the body needs while at rest.

Those in the most active group burned about 1,000 calories a day during activity. They were also 91% less likely to experience declines in memory, concentration and language abilities after five years than those in the least active group.

The middle-range group was also less likely to experience mental declines, but those results were not statistically significant.

So, what were those seniors who were burning 1,000 calories a day doing?

Well, they were no more likely to say they did vigorous exercise, such as walking or swimming, than those in the group that burned the fewest calories. Instead, those who burned the most calories were more active overall -- they reported doing more walking, they climbed more stairs, did more volunteering. They were people who were just moving more.

This study didn't look at younger people, but they may want to look at their daily habits, researchers added.

When people ask, 'What is the one thing I can do to keep dementia at bay?' researchers would say “exercise”. "That has the most clear-cut evidence that it will do something beneficial for your brain.”

Original article Health MSN

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