We believe that no one should have to deal with a mental health issue alone, and we believe that blogs, which include real experiences from real people, may help us achieve this goal. Reading a blog by someone who is going through a similar situation might have a significant impact.
In this blog post, I am posting tips to aware of dementia and its preventive measures.
Coffee might give you a mental boost, but new research says that you should limit yourself to five or six cups per day; drinking more than that may be harmful to your brain. About 400,000 persons who drank coffee on a regular basis were studied (either caffeinated or decaffeinated). The amount of coffee consumed each day was classified into many categories, ranging from one to two cups to more than six cups. MRI was used to measure the volume of 18,000 people’s brains (Willett et al., 2020).
The researchers discovered that strong coffee drinkers (more than six cups per day) had smaller levels of overall brain volume than light coffee drinkers (one to two daily cups), notably in the hippocampus, which is crucial for short- and long-term memory. In comparison to light drinkers, heavy drinkers had a 53 percent increased incidence of dementia diagnosis. Whether participants consumed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee, the risk was almost the same. Dementia is a broad word describing a loss of capacity to recall, think, or make judgments that make it difficult to carry out daily tasks (Bennett et al., 2019).
Can having friends who listen to you help you maintain your memory and thinking abilities?
Having a good listener in your life may have many more health benefits than simply making you feel better when you need to sort out your emotions. Researchers from Harvard indicated that individuals who always had persons around to listen had stronger cognitive resilience better-thinking skills than expected given the number of losses in brain volume than people who didn’t have good listeners in their life. Researchers believe that having someone to talk can help to reduce stress and inflammation in the brain, as well as stimulate chemicals that improve brain function and help you stay sharper for longer.
Work that is mentally demanding may help to lower the risk of dementia.
Do you have work that challenges you mentally? According to a study published in The BMJ on Aug. 21, 2021, it may lower your risk of dementia later in life. Researchers pooled information from several trials to see how occupational characteristics influenced chronic disease, disability, and death. They discovered that persons who worked in intellectually challenging jobs had a 23% lower risk of dementia than those who worked in non-stimulating jobs. Cognitively stimulating employment was characterized as those that required workers to make independent judgments and complete difficult tasks.
References:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/too-much-coffee-may-raise-dementia-risk
Arvanitakis, Z., Shah, R. C., & Bennett, D. A. (2019). Diagnosis and management of dementia. Jama, 322(16), 1589-1599.
van Dam, R. M., Hu, F. B., & Willett, W. C. (2020). Coffee, caffeine, and health. New England Journal of Medicine, 383(4), 369-378.