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WHAT’S VERNON SMITH been doing since he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics at age 75, and why should you care?
At 97, Smith is still on the faculty of the business and law schools at Chapman University. When he’s not traveling the country delivering lectures, he usually spends 10 hours a week writing and researching.
I read about Smith in a recent article in the AARP Bulletin devoted to super-agers, defined as those over age 80 with the brain of a person 20 to 30 years younger. A group of 1,600 over 90-year-olds are being studied at the University of California, Irvine, to better understand this phenomenon.
While the study’s findings will undoubtedly be informative, here are eight things that the AARP article and other sources say you can do right now to increase your odds of a healthy brain for as long as possible.
While we’re talking about super-agers, there’s Ruth Westheimer, the sex therapist known as Dr. Ruth, who is now age 95. She’s quoted in the AARP article saying that, in addition to physical exercise, she uses her mouth a lot—and that helps to exercise her brain.
In addition to just exercising, search out exercises that help address issues you may face. Go beyond the two main areas of focus – cardio/aerobic and weights. If you have a bad back, stretching, back arching, and doing “planks” will help. If you have balance issues, there are a number of exercises that will help you become better at basic things like putting on a pair of pants, or stepping over obstacles. All of these can really help maintain “quality of life” for a longer period of time.
“The Washington Post reported on a study published in The Lancet that encourages the use of hearing aids, which can reduce the risk of cognitive decline by 48% for those with other risk factors.”
But yet Medicare refuses to pay for hearing aids, instead choosing to pay an exorbitant amount of money to treat dementia!
“Get enough sleep. But don’t rely on prescription medicine. A study found that sleep drugs increase the risk of dementia.”
As is often typical, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Here a recent study of studies on the use of taking Trazodone off-label as a sleep hypnotic concluded, in part, the following:
“Nevertheless, 12 of 16 clinical studies demonstrated a neutral or even a beneficial effect on cognition. This indicates that trazodone has no long-term detrimental effect on cognitive function, thus suggesting that despite being FDA-approved only for the treatment of depression [3], trazodone can be safely used in the treatment of comorbid conditions of patients with dementia, such as insomnia, agitation, and other behavioural symptoms.”
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8182348/
So yes, getting enough good sleep is essential to maintaining health but if you must take a sleep aid, as many do, then know that it isn’t necessarily a ticket to dementia.