OREANDA-NEWS A new study suggests that good middle-aged heart health can reduce the chances of problems with thinking and memory later in life. To minimize the risk of dementia, scientists recommend monitoring the state of the cardiovascular system.

Scientists conducted a study involving about 7,900 adult Britons who, at the age of 50, had no cardiovascular disease or dementia. Over 25 years of follow-up, an average of 347 cases of dementia were diagnosed among participants. Average age at diagnosis: 75 years.

Taking other factors into account, researchers linked higher scores at age 50 to seven healthy habits outlined in the American Heart Association's Life Simple 7, a lower risk of developing dementia later in life.

Life Simple 7 measures smoking, diet, physical activity, fasting blood sugar, blood cholesterol, blood pressure and body mass index (an indicator of body fat based on height and weight).

According to a study published in BMJ, dementia was 1.3 per 1000 person-years among participants monitoring the state of the cardiovascular system, compared with 3.2 per 1000 people with low rates who did not.

Dementia (lat. dementia — madness) — acquired dementia, persistent decline in cognitive activity with the loss to some extent previously acquired knowledge and practical skills and difficulty or inability to acquire new ones. Unlike mental retardation (oligophrenia), dementia congenital or acquired in infancy, which is a underdevelopment of the psyche, dementia — the collapse of mental functions that occurs as a result of brain damage, most often — in old age (senile dementia; from lat. senilis — senile). In people senile dementia is called senile insanity. According to who, in 2015, there were more than 46 million people with dementia worldwide[3]. In 2017, this number increased to 50 million[4]. Each year, 7.7 million new cases of dementia are reported, each of which places a heavy burden on families and health systems[4]. It is expected that this number will increase to 131.5 million by 2050[5].

On localization allocate:

cortical — with a predominant lesion of the cerebral cortex (Alzheimer's disease, frontal-temporal lobar degeneration, alcoholic encephalopathy);
subcortical — with a predominant lesion of subcortical structures (progressive nuclear paralysis, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, multi-infarction dementia (defeat of white matter));
cortical-subcortical (disease with Lewy bodies, corticobasal degeneration, vascular dementia);
multifocal — with multiple focal lesions (Creutzfeldt — Jakob disease).