Arnold Schwarzenegger has some good tips about reducing Alzheimer’s risk

“Studies suggest that your hippocampus — an area of your brain responsible for learning and memory — is targeted by neurodegenerative disease,” he writes. “Resistance training appears to protect against — or completely prevent — atrophy in that region, which could help protect against Alzheimer’s. Insulin resistance is also linked to Alzheimer’s, and resistance training helps improve insulin sensitivity.”

He cites a peer-reviewed scientific study from 2020 conducted by researchers in Australia and Great Britain.

Dementia and cognitive decline are rarely out of the news these days. In the case of Williams and Willis, they have a distinct variant that is different from Alzheimer’s, primarily affecting the frontal lobes. But dementia of all kinds — and Alzheimer’s is by far the most common — is on the rise. Already an estimated 6.7 million Americans have it, and millions more have cognitive impairment or decline.

Incredibly, a 22-year-old was just diagnosed with the devastating disease in Britain.

Schwarzenegger is on the right track, but he’s just scratching the surface. All sorts of things that are good for our general health are good for helping fight dementia. A study just came out that found yoga was also good at lowering the risks, especially among older women. Yoga, it seems, beat memory training.

Participants who took a yoga course for 12 weeks showed an improvement in memory including delayed recall. Astonishingly, they also showed some biological changes, including increases in both connectivity and volume in the hippocampus — a critical area in the brain. 

Even more remarkably, the yoga involved was simple and very gentle: Just 12 one-hour classes — one a week — plus 12 minutes a day. The one-hour classes just involved rhythmic breathing, quiet chanting, and a resting pose. The daily exercise entailed chanting, which we’ve written about here before.

Sounds a lot easier than resistance training, but doing both would be even better.

There is no cure for dementia. The main clinical breakthrough is a new drug that can slow the disease. But outside the lab, there has been a lot of progress. We now know that eating the right foods, living near greenery, avoiding pollution and walking a lot are among the many things likely to help, as is something like learning a new instrument.

And, yes, governor, exercise — including resistance training.

But maybe more important than what we do is what we don’t do.

A new scientific report just came out listing the “14 broadly defined modifiable risk factors” that are most associated with future dementia. Some of them are less “modifiable” than others.

The easier ones are drinking too much alcohol, eating too much and becoming obese, having a poor diet (apparently eating fish is recommended), doing too little physical activity, smoking, and getting too little vitamin D. Other risk factors that are less easy to fix include having depression, bad sleep patterns, social isolation, traumatic brain injury, high blood pressure, or diabetes mellitus. This was based on an exhaustive study of scientific studies published to date, involving — in total — 90 million people.

One of the challenges is changing people’s behavior. And one of the challenges to that is getting the word out. If there’s a bigger voice than Arnie’s, you’d have a hard time finding it.