from Hacker News

Two new dementia risks identified by major report

by tagawa on 7/31/24, 10:05 PM with 14 comments

  • by roughly on 7/31/24, 11:37 PM

    It's interesting to look at the list of factors from the article - there's an obvious set of physical factors (obesity, cholesterol, smoking, etc), and then there's things like hearing loss, social isolation, and now visual loss, that all seem to be associated with less input to the brain or less informational processing. There's also the studies around staying cognitively active - my understanding is a lot of that is building additional capacity so the effects of dementia & Alzheimers are less noticeable, but it's interesting to see this kind of almost "hardware/software" split in the risk factors.

    Depression is an interesting one because it's so multicausal that I'd almost wonder if it's a comorbidity, rather than a risk factor.

  • by sien on 7/31/24, 11:45 PM

    For anyone who wants to help do something about dementia, at least in a tiny way, and is perhaps concerned about their own risk of dementia there is a pretty easy way you can contribute.

    The UCSH Brain Health Registry :

    https://www.brainhealthregistry.org

    You can register and every few months you answer some questions about yourself and do some fairly basic mental health tests.

  • by Archelaos on 7/31/24, 10:36 PM

    Is this based on an intervention study or were they just looking for correlations?

  • by musha68k on 8/1/24, 12:19 AM

    Let's not forget viruses like Covid which is still wreaking havoc on our brains.

    Danielle Beckman is not only researching this space but trying to make us more aware:

    https://ucdavis.app.box.com/s/6stuakg87dvmhjhkmg2j9219sou28u...

    https://www.daniellebeckman.com/projects-8

    https://x.com/danibeckman

  • by chaostheory on 8/1/24, 12:01 AM

    I’m surprised poor sleep isn’t on the list.

  • by fxtentacle on 7/31/24, 10:35 PM

    failing eyesight and high cholesterol

    I hate those headlines that could easily be informative but instead are optimised for clicks.