Worried about dementia? Check your facts, and your age bias.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: dementia rates are dropping. There are more cases because there are more older people as a percentage of the population, and age *is* the biggest risk factor.  But your risk is lower than the risk for your parents’ generation. Most of that risk doesn’t emerge until after age 85. And people are being diagnosed at later ages. That’s according to new research reported by Paula Span in the New York Times and published in the Journal of the American Medical association.

Want to hold dementia at bay? Check your age bias. Study after study shows that attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function.  People with more positive feelings about aging—fact- rather than fear-based, that is—walk faster, heal quicker, live longer, and are less likely to develop dementia—even if they carry the gene that predisposes them to the disease. 

Much of the research has been conducted by Yale’s Becca Levy, whose latest finding is remarkable: positive age beliefs help prevent cognitive decline. Not only that, they can reverse it, and improve memory. And not only that: participants with more accurate, positive beliefs about aging were also significantly less likely to experience cognitive impairment at all.

Dementia is a wretched disease. We don’t understand what causes it, and we’re nowhere near a cure. We do know that anxiety about dementia is itself a health risk. There’s a lot about growing older that we can’t control. We are in charge of what we know and how we feel about it.