Curious to see how a lifetime of nonstop digital interactive puzzles leaves us. (Video games)
The study seems to go against everything else I've seen which suggests that as people are living longer, the incidence are increasing, not decreasing. However, my understanding is that as we get better at curing cancers, reducing heart-disease, and generally increasing life-span, the longer a person lives, the more likely they are to get dementia.
[1]https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia [2]https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/australia...
Toxins in cigarette smoke also cause inflammation and stress to cells, which have both been linked to Alzheimer's disease."
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/managing-the-ri...
[1] https://www.heart.org/en/news/2021/07/06/smoking-harms-the-b...
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/blog/why-dementia-different-wo...
The two current prevailing theories are, both of which focus on the amyloid hypothesis are
1) menopause changes in grey matter reduce the glymphatic systems ability to flush metabolic waste from the brain
2) sleep loss during child-rearing and menopause result in increased amyloid load, which begins the cycle of reduced ability of the glymphatic system to remove waste from the brain.
I know someone is going to come in complaining about the amyliod hypothesis, but it is unlikely to be "wrong", it is just incomplete. We are likely lumping multiple different diseases together under the label of Alzheimer's because we don't understand the disease well enough yet.
The prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea is much larger in men than in women. If sleep loss were the only factor we probably would see greater dementia incidence in men, due to long-term chronic sleep loss from OSA.
Some of the research on gas stove pollution noticed an uptick in problems for women and linked it to them being closest to poorly operating kitchen burners (and burning food particles themselves might be a factor).
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-has-proba...
Glancing at the data for the US this seems to go the opposite direction, ramping to a peak in the 60-70s when I'd assume most damage in early years and/or working age.
Though perhaps local and widespread air pollution are not following the same trajectory.
I can't find a quote but one trivia bit from 'diesel gate' is that the execs were aware of the neurotoxicity of NO2 and other substances that were found in higher concentration in diesel exhaust.
The "younger generations" in this study were born between 1944 and 1948. (Older, 1890 to 1913.) Pesticides don't explain why those born in the former have less dementia than those born between 1939 and 1943.
They additionally cite in the article that perhaps it's smoking that's changed, yet that also didn't really significantly change in public until the 90s.
40 additional years of pesticides/lead/smoking/etc will take their toll.
Prevalence of smoking in the US peaked at around 45% in the 1950s, and had dropped to around 25% by the 1990s. (Depending on your own age, this may feel wrong because there was a surge in youth smoking from the 80s peaking in the mid-1990s, so its easy for people in a certainnage range to feel like smoking was very prevalent through the 1990s, and then dropped like a rock.)
Wouldn't you expect to see more variation between the American and European cohorts if smoking were the culprit?
As is smoking of other things
https://www.healthline.com/health/alzheimers-dementia/nicoti...
(Not calling healthline a source, but it has links to publications for those interested).
It's important to note, of course, that smoking increases the risk of pretty much every bad health related thing that can happen to you, including dementia. However, using nicotine without smoking might have benefits due to its effects on acetylcholine receptors.
Is that a poor assumption?
Before DDT went into wide use in the 1940s, aersnic based pesticides were common.
Here's a particularly nasty one that was commonly used up until DDT replaced it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_hydrogen_arsenate?wprov=s...
IDK if there's a way to measure who got the most poison though.
The nail in the coffin for the hypothesis is the lack of significant variation between the US and European cohorts. Europeans were killed indiscriminately. Our men were selectively slaughtered. If there was a selection effect, you'd expect that to present in the American cohorts and not European ones; that is not observed.
> Could it have been that most of the healthy males (e.g. good testosterone levels, and whatever else made virile young males) were away at war
A lot of healthy males were not away at war, because staying and performing their job was important.
If only there was something big in the world happening from 1939 to 1945 ...
Most flavor compounds in herbs and spices are also neurotoxins, coffee and chocolate contain many neurotoxins, nearly every naturally occurring stimulant or psychoactive substance humans use is a neurotoxins targeting a different creature. We happen to find many of them pleasant or tasty because they evolved to target very distant relatives or we are just weirdos that find mildly poisoning ourselves fun.
Silent Spring leaned far too much on fear and exaggeration which is a disservice to the much more complicated issues we face with synthetic chemistry and controlling our environment.
Diseases (and especially virii) are showing to leave behind WAY more damage than everybody thought. Nutritional stress leaves behind lasting damage as well.
The early cohort being compared went through the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression. Who knows how much damage those left?
I have some friends that had Hashimoto's disease. Type 1 diabetes. Friends with lupus. 4-5 friends that had Guillain-Barre syndrome. My mom died of ITP. I have sarcoidosis. I have friends who for unexplained reasons are 'unwell'
ITP is an interesting one. The antibodies target an enzyme that's needed to keep your blood platelets from binding together in your blood. Thus the idea that you can have autoimmune syndromes that can mess with thousands of different enzymes and proteins. Or stimulate inappropriately. Seriously why not.
I can totally believe that infection with childhood diseases of yore could lead to dementia later in life.
> Patients who received the Tdap/Td vaccine were 30% less likely than their unvaccinated peers to develop Alzheimer’s disease (7.2% of vaccinated patients versus 10.2% of unvaccinated patients developed the disease). Similarly, HZ vaccination was associated with a 25% reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (8.1% of vaccinated patients versus 10.7% of unvaccinated patients). For the pneumococcal vaccine, there was an associated 27% reduced risk of developing the disease (7.92% of vaccinated patients versus 10.9% of unvaccinated patients).
[1] https://www.uth.edu/news/story/several-vaccines-associated-w...
Huh, it looks deeper than mere correlation [1][2].
The simple explanation is inflammation. The intriguing potential is the vaccines train the immune system to clear something harmful.
EDIT: It looks like some HSV antibodies also attack various Alzheimer's-related compounds, including "Aß protein, tau protein, presenilin, rabaptin-5, β-NGF, BDNF, mTG, and enteric nerve" [3]. Wild. I wonder if there is a link between the vaccination status of a mother and childhood dementia presentation.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03201-5
> Researchers found that compared to those who didn't get the shingles vaccination, those who received it...
> were 3.5% less likely to develop dementia over seven years (a 20% reduction)
These types of findings are problematic for anti-vaxxers, however they seem likely to overcome this through their wholesale butchery of US research.
[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-a-routine-vaccine-pr...
I also wonder this kind of thing about other long term treatments - perhaps Prozac prevents dementia, or causes it.
Everything from your occupation, to your diet, to martial status, to hobbies, and much more have been shown to have significant relationships with dementia rates. The problem you obviously run into here is that a person's approach towards healthcare is itself a major behavioral characteristic and so seeing varying rates of dementia based on this characteristic alone would be very unsurprising.
Sure. That's why the antibody cross-reactivity is intriguing.
Excuse me?
The vast majority of millennials did not receive the chicken pox vaccine as it was not FDA approved until 1995. The youngest millennials were born in 1996. The oldest millennials were already in high school by 1995.
The only people in the US who have received an immunization for chicken pox were those who were NOT exposed to the chicken pox virus prior to 1995 (the first year it was available).
Before immunizations almost everyone got chicken pox in the first few years of life.
Thus the majority of people born between 1981 and 1996 were exposed to the chicken pox virus before 1995 and weren't eligible for immunization.
I was born in the early 80s and got chicken pox in 1993. It was considered very late at the time, everyone was like "wow, how have you not had chicken pox before?"
While we're speculating as to causes obstructive sleep apnea is associated with dementia, estimates are that 30 million people have it, and we only invented CPAPs in 1980.
For CPAP to be primarily responsible, we would need a very sizeable portion of the population to be using them, but I think the numbers are less than 3% right?
From the article as to the effect size:
“For example, in the US, among people aged 81 to 85, 25.1% of those born between 1890–1913 had dementia, compared to 15.5% of those born between 1939–1943,”
I'm not saying that CPAPs don't contribute, but they are not likely the main contributors.
(If everybody who uses CPAPs would get dementia, and they are 100% effective at preventing that, the drop would still be ‘only’ 3% of the population)
Zepbound is FDA-approved for OSA.
I wonder if we'll discover that there's actually an endemic deficiency in endogenous GLP-1 production due to some other cause? The usual suspects of environmental contamination or subclinical infection, perhaps.
Measures of OSA (Obstructive sleep apnea) are somewhat poor, more focused on the amount of pauses in breathing, rather than oxygen desaturation, which is the secondary measure. Note, you don't breath 100% of the time when you're awake either.
I work in sleep and neurotech, and at a large sleep conference last year, a talk was given about better methods to measure apnea. It was clear these measures would have significant challenges in being adopted because it would result in less people being diagnosed as needing CPAP.
Lastly, the impact of CPAP in improving cognitive function is inconclusive [1]. Not that it doesn't have an affect. It does in some people, but not in others.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13899...
Oxygen desaturation correlates with long-term metabolic outcomes, but correlates very poorly to day-to-day symptoms.
The actual primary cause of symptoms in SDB is microarousals resulting from increased respiratory effort, and sleep studies using 3%-or-arousal criteria report MUCH higher OSA rates than the commonly used hypoxia+reduction in flow criteria, while also having a much higher correlation with symptoms(>60% vs ~17% for AHI), and the problem is not over, but under- diagnosis since people with relatively few apneas(e.g. UARS patients) are rarely diagnosed correctly.
Also, (optimally) healthy people DO breathe 100% of the time during sleep- breathing during sleep is controlled by a different system while awake, and is extremely regular during NREM sleep, with REM merely introducing noise to breath amplitude. Any and all pauses in breathing are caused by sleep disruption.
The only reason why it seems like apnea-based criteria are oversensitive is because obese, older men often DON'T wake up from airway collapse and may be fine at 5, 10, or even 15 AHI. For everyone else, it's possible to have debilitating symptoms at 4 because the actual Respiratory Disturbance Index is 20+.
Goddammit man. People like you are why so many go their entire lives unable to find treatment. If you're working in the field, educate yourself about it. Ugh.
Way too many professionals in the field thinking that they're the first person to think about something when literally millions of people think about this same thing all day every day.
I wonder if the risk of head injury has reduced with time?
Almost 2x more likely [1].
> wonder if the risk of head injury has reduced with time?
The lack of spikes from the world wars would suggest otherwise.
[1] https://karger.com/ned/article-pdf/56/1/4/3752570/000520966....
But generally, bullets, disease, and malnutrition don't cause the same sort of brain trauma.
https://newsroom.uw.edu/news-releases/blast-related-concussi...
Bunch of wind instrument legends started dying relatively young around that time, and he went "yeah… no."
(Granted, he wasn't doing drugs and alcohol like musicians probably do, but it was still enough to scare him away.)
your grandparents were more physically active - brain and body are connected
your grandparents didn't eat ultra processed food because it hadn't been invented yet...once again, brain and body are connected
It's not trivial to say that our grandparents read more than us. Paper books, newspapers and magazines are less common but we have ebooks, substacks and online newspapers now.
> your grandparents were more physically active
Perhaps at work, but my access to exercise during leisure time is much greater.
> your grandparents didn't eat ultra processed food because it hadn't been invented yet
I don't have hard data on this, but I think it's fair to say their generation's overall exposure to toxins was much greater. DEET, smoking, leaded petrol, asbestos and coal power stations seem much worse than the occasional McFlurry.
Don't forget petro wast such as plastic. It is amazing that we are still a live.
Just another day my parents were annoyed remembering that the "big, bad government" banned a popular medicine from my grandfather's time. One that people used on cuts all the time.
Turns out the medicine was lead acetate.
It was prepared from mercuric acetate and sodium dibromofluorescein.
Goulard's extract, containing lead subacetate, was used on cuts too, but from what I can tell it wasn't nearly as widespread/famous as Mercurochrome.
It was lead acetate, dissolved on water and a small bit of ethanol.
We still do? Tiktok/shorts are that on the toilet/in bed activity. I still spend I'd guess on average at least 8 hours a day reading. Not necessarily books but diverse articles, game guides, work stuff..
> your grandparents were more physically active - brain and body are connected
More physically active but not more active in skillful tasks. I've seen correlation between less/later dementia and things like playing musical instruments but I've not heard of construction workers being dementia resistant.
> your grandparents didn't eat ultra processed food because it hadn't been invented yet...once again, brain and body are connected
Mine ate whatever was available. Many unleavened flour+water flatbreads baked on the woodfire oven used for heating, rice and lots of lye in winter. Lots of fruits and veggies when available.
Now we mostly eat much better. You have every single fruit/vegetable/meat available 365 days a week, very clean food.. Only gotta stop yourself from overindulging.
We also have better medicine, better cleaning products, better understanding of what's toxic and bans based on that..
This is a reach... Have you met old people? They vegetate in front of the TV channel surfing- their version of TikTok- never questioning the content or researching topics further on their own. And after 40 years of this activity still don't know how to operate the remote.
I'm not actually sure my grandparents were able to read, let alone for entertainment. Not in the US fwiw.
I strongly disagree. Reading books as activity, maybe. It depends on the person too. But reading itself? In this time and age, we are constantly reading, either in your phone ( even most tiktok videos these days have subs for everything ), browsing the web is a constant reading activity, work/email/essays/whatsapp/telegram, completely outweights the amount of text we read/write now comparing it with our older generation.
Interestingly, the opposite seems to have been happening in Malaysia. The older generation tend to be able to speak a ton of languages (Malay, English, Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien, maybe more), my generation has mostly settled on just English. I have gone out of my way to learn Japanese but even then, I can only understand 4 languages and speak 2 vs the 5 languages my parents/grandparents are essentially native speakers of.
(Provided that you have basic understanding to the language)
> “For example, in the US, among people aged 81 to 85, 25.1% of those born between 1890–1913 had dementia, compared to 15.5% of those born between 1939–1943,” said Lenzen, adding similar trends were seen in Europe and England, although less pronounced in the latter.
I don't think people born between 1939 and 1943 are less likely to have dementia because of all of the cognitive activity that went into replying to e-mails and choosing groceries online back in the 1970s.
Like knowing multiple languages/ multiple words for one thing.
It's pretty well established that greater lead exposure leads to increased risk of cognitive decline.
I'm not saying that's all of it, but it seems like it could be as much of a factor as anything.
One big thing that changed in these decades is cleanliness simply due to better cleaning chemicals. Which certainly caused a reduction of infections of all kinds.
Any reading on that?
I know people who've been obese all their lives and lost massive amount of weight once they were properly explained stuff like calories, glycemic index, excercise... I wish I was joking but some people out there are not even aware that food is supposed to be fuel for the body, not just something that you take when you're bored or because it tastes good and make you feel happy.
It isn't strong proof by any other means. The bias of the accounts excluding it would sort of be like concluding that acne wasn't an issue because painted portraits of teens excluded them. I don't know if this theory is true but it is certainly an interesting one.
scroot•2d ago
gwbas1c•2d ago
That being said, there's some remarkable correlations with bans on leaded gasoline.
olddustytrail•2d ago
He's been referred to as a "one man environmental disaster".
SoftTalker•2d ago
JumpCrisscross•2d ago
Unclear. The cohort most exposed to atmospheric lead was born between 1951 and 1980 [1]. This study only measures those born before 1948.
(To the extent the study supports a hypothesis, it's the null. Given atmospheric lead increased from 1890 onwards, until about the 1980s [2], if lead were the culprit we'd expect to see more dementia among the study's younger generations. Not less.)
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118631119
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
Nopoint2•1d ago