Not too long ago, we highlighted a list of easy activities you can incorporate into your daily life to keep you cognitively fit and to lower your risk for dementia. It’s becoming increasingly clear that how you live your life, and what you do each day, can have a significant impact on how your brain ages and whether you’re at risk for cognitive decline. So it’s important to understand the impact of everyday actions and choices, especially as new research suggests dementia diagnoses often come after long delays, as long as 3-4 years after the onset of symptoms, depending on your age, socioeconomic status, cultural beliefs, and access to specialists, among other factors (including fear of stigma if you are diagnosed). With this diagnostic timeline, it can mean that some people are diagnosed too late to benefit from current treatment options or lifestyle changes. That makes it all the more important to proactively understand how a healthier lifestyle can both lower your dementia risk and perhaps slow down cognitive decline if symptoms begin to appear. For a good review of some current approaches to treating dementia once a diagnosis is made, click here.

Brand new research studies underscore the value of lifestyle tweaks and changes to shore up your cognitive strength. First, a just-published study in JAMA Network demonstrated an important correlation between healthy habits and brain health protection. Considered the biggest randomized clinical trial to study whether healthy behaviors could lower the risk of dementia, the researchers found that multiple behavior modifications, including eating a healthier diet, increasing physical activity, keeping your brain stimulated, and managing heart health risks, could all benefit the preservation of your cognitive functioning. The study involved over 2000 participants, from diverse geographic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, none of whom had cognitive impairment at the study’s start, and all of whom led sedentary lifestyles and had other risks for dementia (such as heart health problems). One group of participants was heavily guided and supported in their healthy behavior changes, while the other group was largely self-guided. Both groups showed improvement, but those within the structured program showed greater improvement in cognitive function. While this is not definitive proof that lifestyle changes lead to cognitive improvement, the study adds important new weight to the movement toward behavioral change as an important factor in lowering dementia risk. For more on this study, read here.

Another new study adds to this hypothesis. Published in The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, researchers considered the connected origins of dementia, depression, and stroke (all potentially contributing to brain disease and all sharing underlying damage to small blood vessels in the brain). Having one of these is often connected to having one or both of the others. Researchers examined the use of lifestyle changes to address these 3 conditions and reported that lifestyle changes, including more cognitive activity, more physical activity, diet improvement (more fruits and veggies), and greater social networking, could reduce the risk and symptoms of each of these conditions. While there are no “magic bullets” to prevent or ameliorate these health challenges, it does appear that incremental lifestyle changes can go a long way in lowering your risk and improving your health and well-being.

Finally, if you’re looking for some “real-world” validation, take some advice from British dementia specialist Dr. Gill Livingston, who recently described her efforts to reduce her own risk in an article in The Telegraph. Among the most important habits she’s adopted? She wears hearing aids; she regularly has her eyes checked; she keeps her blood pressure and cholesterol numbers in check; she doesn’t stress about sleep but tries to build up her “sleep pressure” each day so she’s tired at night; she’s physically active; she keeps her mind working and her social life engaged, and she focuses on her “health span” much more than her longevity. As she makes clear, the goal is “compaction of morbidity,” that is, trying to get to a stage of health and point in life where your disabling illnesses, including dementia, are only with you for a short time. If you can get to a healthy late stage in life with some healthier behavior tweaks right now, that seems like a pretty good bargain to strike.