Two people diagnosed with the same level of dementia can go on to have different experiences in terms of quality of life, depending on how much they drink, smoke and exercise, an expert on the disorder has said.
Speaking at a sold-out Edinburgh book festival event, June Andrews said that drugs for the disease had so far failed to work. Instead, lifestyle choices were paramount in determining how the symptoms progressed.
Professor Andrews, the director of the Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling, said it was possible for people with dementia to live their lives “mildly dependent” and only deteriorate just before death.
She warned that if advice on how to prevent dementia developing was ignored, patients could become “extremely dependent” soon after their diagnosis.
“There are all sorts of things people can do to keep above the level of mild dependency,” she said. “Smoking — the fuel that the brain uses is oxygen so why would you starve your brain of the very thing that keeps it going?”
Advertisement
Although she said research had suggested a glass of wine a day was good for dementia, she warned that “your brain becomes damaged as soon as you get drunk” and said binge drinking was far worse than drinking small amounts frequently.
Professor Andrews went on to stress the important of exercise, in particular for vascular dementia, and suggested that even a walk each day could stave off symptoms.
She said that little was known about what effect modern technology, such as phones and tablets, would have on younger generations who “constantly interrupt each other with nonsense” and lose their “capacity to concentrate”.
“Most people who get dementia are over 75 years old,” she said. “It means we may not have any knowledge of how technology has affected people for another 30 years.”