By Matthew Heimer
Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are specters that haunt many families’ retirement-planning conversations; leaving aside their devastating emotional toll, their financial impact can be both massive and unpredictable. So there’s reason to find encouragement in two studies published recently in the British medical journal The Lancet. The studies, one conducted in England and Wales and the other in Denmark, suggest that the percentage of the elderly population afflicted with dementia has significantly declined in recent years—and they bolster the theory that good behavioral habits in adult life can lower one’s odds of getting dementia.
Previous studies have associated higher dementia rates with high blood pressure and cholesterol levels (in part because dementia is sometimes brought on by minor strokes). Others suggested that dementia risks tended to drop as education rose. As Gina Kolata explains today in the New York Times, some experts on aging have hypothesized that dementia rates would drop as developed-world societies grew better educated on average and got better at controlling and treating cardiovascular problems. The new studies, which compared recent surveys of the mental functioning of older population groups with similar surveys conducted many years earlier, strengthen that case.
The British study, published this week, looked at two randomly selected groups of people over age 65 who were tested for dementia—one group between 1984 and 1994, and the other between 2008 and 2011. The rate of dementia in the newer group was 6.2%, down from 8.3% in the earlier group. The Danish study, released last week, compared performance scores on a mental-ability test given to people in their 90s; among the group tested in 2010, 17% showed signs of severe impairment, down from 22% in 1998, while the share of test-takers scoring at the highest level nearly doubled over that span.
Of course, the steady increase in the over-65 population in the U.S. and other advanced nations means that the total number of dementia sufferers is likely to continue growing well into the future, and for those families whose loved ones do develop the disease, the costs and other burdens remain daunting. Still, researchers argue that the studies add ammunition to the argument that lifestyle changes in the present can protect our mental faculties in the future—and if they’re right, that’s reason for optimism for many.
And if you’re working longer than you’d prefer to so you can bolster your retirement savings…well, it turns out that may also be cause for optimism, too. French researchers announced at an Alzheimer’s conference on Monday that their study of French retirees showed that the risk of dementia declined with each additional year a person put off retiring—suggesting that staying active at work can help bolster your brain’s health. Researchers told the Associated Press that their study included analyses that eliminated people who developed Alzheimer’s shortly after retiring, in order to rule out the likelihood that their eroding mental powers had caused their retirement.