On Monday I made a special trip to the
Ticketmaster office in Red Deer. I wanted to be certain we got a
group of tickets to a play, as a Christmas present to the family. (No
spoiler alert needed here: the family already knows about the plan,
and besides, I'm not so sure they read my blog anyway).
I got there half an hour early, and had
my info written down: the date and time of the performance (a matinee
would be best). I even had time to talk about the play with a lady
who was also waiting for ticket sales to open. She'd seen it in New
York, and was eager to see it again when it comes to Edmonton in
March.
So when the ticket booth opened, I was
ready. Except, right at that moment, I couldn't
recall the name of the play. The words disappeared.
My brain was racing in circles. You
know, the funny play, the one that was such a hit in New York, the
South Park one. Ah yes, to my relief, the words “The Book of
Mormon” surfaced — hopefully without too much of a pause.
Not my first such moment, and I hope to
be around long enough that it won't be my last.
Having words, or the names of people
and things, just vanish en route between memory and speech is not
uncommon as we get older. Nor its it reason to panic for fear that
one is descending into Alzheimer's.
But it gives one an uncomfortable
pause, and more than just an uncomfortable pause in conversation.
We're told that about 10 per cent of
Canadians over 65 suffer from dementia, notably Alzheimer's. We're
also told that in the coming decade or so, the number of cases
diagnosed in Canada is expected to triple.
Outside of a particular gene that is
responsible for about 25 per cent of cases, there is no known cause
of Alzheimer's. There is no pill you can take for it. There's nothing
much you can do about it once you have it, and nobody screens you for
the risk of getting it.
Alzheimer's disease is the grey terror
of the greying generation.
But there is one proven preventative,
and one therapy that's been proven effective. It's free; no drug
company can put a patent on it.
The preventative and the therapy is
simple exercise — and the more the better.
This week, the culmination of 17 years
of research on 150,000 volunteer study participants put some numbers
around how much exercise prevents how much Alzheimer's.
It's 150 minutes a week, minimum, in
doses as short at 10 minutes, for effective levels to be reached,
says Dr. Paul Williams, author of a study titled National Runners'
and Walkers' Health Study.
That's just the minimum effective dose.
Double it, and Dr. Williams says his study subjects reduced their
risk of dying of Alzheimer's disease by as much as 40 per cent.
Considering the size of our aging
population, that's huge. If a similar number of people came down with
the flu, for instance, we'd call it an epidemic. Yet if that number
of cases could be prevented... we call it nothing at all.
Dr. Jordan Antflick, of the Ontario
Brain Institute says his reading of some 800 similar studies suggests
even the progress of Alzheimer's can be slowed, and even if you don't
take your exercise medicine until after diagnosis.
This is big news. The collective wisdom
on Alzheimer's has been that once it takes hold in your brain, it is
inexorable, unstoppable. Resistance is futile.
Not anymore. We now realize we can
indeed repair our brains — at least where memory and cognition are
concerned.
As early as 2010, author Barbara
Strauch reported in her book The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain
that neurologists had pinpointed
a small portion of the hippocampus — called the dentate gyrus —
that grows amazingly fast in people (and white lab mice) who exercise
vigourously. The dentate gyrus is critical to memory formation and
assimilation with older memories.
Dr.
Antflick says simple exercise can prevent more than one in seven new
cases of Alzheimer's. The minimum dose — 150 minutes per week of
exercise vigorous enough to get your heart rate elevated — can also
lessen the depression suffered by people who have the disease.
Exercise lowers the incidence of people falling — often the last
physical insult a senior's body takes before death. Exercise keeps
people living independently at home longer.
A
total population prescription of 150 minutes (or more) of
heart-stimulating exercise per week can save our health care system
hundreds of millions of dollars a year. With virtually zero up-front
cost.
Walk,
run, swim, ride a bike, anything at all. The more energy you expend,
the better. (Example: you need to walk twice as long to get the same
benefit as a short run, but the doctors say it all works out the
same.)
It's
the best medicine ever found for lifting depression, improving
cognition and preventing a host of other ailments from mental illness to heart disease,
diabetes, kidney failure and even some forms of cancer — all of
which threaten to overwhelm our health care system.
And then, if
you can't remember the name of a play you want to see, you can laugh
about it. Sort of.
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