How do you prevent dementia?
Answers
Detecting and preventing dementia is challenging because the underlying causes are often unknown. Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are often linked to heart disease and stroke, which you can prevent by reducing the risk of these conditions. No matter how healthy you are, the following tips can help you stay that way:
• Quit smoking.
• Maintain a healthy weight.
• Engage in a lot of physical activity.
• Eat nutritious foods.
• Manage health problems like diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol.
• Maintain mental alertness by taking up new activities, reading, or solving crossword puzzles.
• Remain socially active. Participate in community events, church, or support groups.
• Take aspirin if your doctor allows it.
To prevent dementia, you should take as many steps as possible to keep your brain active and stimulate your neural connections daily. You can practice sharpening your brain by completing puzzles weekly or even daily. Puzzles offer cognitive training that improves multiple brain areas, such as memory, reasoning, and speed processing.
Doing these sorts of games, you practice recall abilities and work different nerves within the brain to help keep them healthy. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, exercise and diet improve overall health and prevent dementia. By providing more blood and oxygen to brain cells, the practice has the potential to improve brain function significantly.
Exercising also increases the levels of brain chemicals called growth factors, which aid the process of establishing new connections between brain cells and generating new brain cells. Complex activities such as playing tennis or taking a dance class are even more stimulating for the mind.
Playing word puzzles, video games, card games, etc., has been proven to be one of the best ways to prevent dementia. Therefore, I try to keep my mind active for almost 2 hours a day by doing the above activities.
