Memory Matters Weekly #28
If someone told you that being optimistic could reduce your risk of dementia, you’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes. It sounds like the kind of thing printed on a motivational poster in a GP waiting room, somewhere between “laugh more” and “drink eight glasses of water.”
But a new study from Harvard, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, followed over 9,000 older adults for up to 14 years and found that people who scored higher on optimism had a lower risk of developing dementia.
About 15% lower, to be exact.
Which sounds simple enough, of course, basically just be more optimistic! Except it’s not that simple.
The people who were more “optimistic” in this study were also more likely to be healthier, more physically active, have fewer existing health conditions, and far less likely to be depressed. The most optimistic quarter of participants had nearly six times lower rates of probable depression than the least optimistic group.
So what are we actually measuring here? Optimism, or the kind of life that makes it easier to feel optimistic in the first place?
The study treats optimism as something measurable on its own, which makes sense for research, but in real life it rarely exists on its own. It tends to reflect how someone is doing more broadly. Their health, their energy levels, how much strain they are under, how much support they have around them. All of that feeds into how someone answers a question about whether they feel positive about the future.
The researchers are honest about this, they couldn’t fully untangle it. What they can say is that even after adjusting for depression, health conditions, education, smoking and physical activity etc, and after removing everyone who developed dementia within the first two years of follow-up, the association still held
Optimism is not something that can be separated from the context someone is living in. It moves with everything else. It rises and falls alongside health, stress, and day-to-day stability.
The real question the study points toward is what conditions make a protective life more or less possible. That’s really having good health, social connections, manageable stress levels, a sense that the future holds something worth looking forward to. Things not everyone has.
That’s where the study has real value, all of those things can add a protective layer to someone’s life, and that can change someone’s outlook on life and they’re the same things that caregiving can slowly take away if you don’t do things to protect against it.
Looking after your own wellbeing shouldn’t be an afterthought. Which is a bit harder to package than “think positive.”
Read the full study here: Journal of the American Geriatrics Society
In Other News This Week
Carer’s Allowance Turns 50 – and the Maths Still Doesn’t Add Up
This week marks 50 years since carer’s allowance was introduced in the UK. When it launched in 1976, then called the invalid care allowance, it paid £7.90 a week, and married women weren’t even eligible. Today it pays £86.45 a week. According to Carers UK, if it had kept pace with earnings growth over those five decades, carers would be receiving an extra £160.46 a month. One carer quoted in this Guardian article calculated she provides 133 hours of care a week, the equivalent of 65p an hour. Meanwhile, unpaid carers across the UK collectively provide support valued at more than £184 billion a year. That’s more than three quarters of the entire NHS budget. Half a century on, it’s an anniversary that raises more questions than it answers. Read more here: The Guardian
Plant-Based Diets and Dementia Risk – But Quality Is Everything
A study of nearly 93,000 adults followed for an average of 11 years, published in Neurology, found that people eating the highest quality plant-based diets had a 12% lower risk of dementia. But the finding that stands out is what happened when people’s diets got worse over time, moving toward unhealthier plant-based eating increased dementia risk by 25%. Those who went the other way and improved their diet quality reduced their risk by 11%. The researchers also found the effect held regardless of whether people were younger or older than 60 when they made the change, suggesting it’s genuinely not too late. The important caveat: not all plant-based eating is equal. A diet high in ultra-processed foods, refined grains and added sugar, even if technically plant-based, appeared to raise risk rather than lower it.
Read more here: Medical News Today
Read more here → About Khadra Awomer’s dementia caregiver journey