5 ways to build an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain | Lisa Genova

- People think that memory should be perfect. They believe it is designed to remember everything they want to remember. And that's not how it works. Our

brain

s are not designed to remember people's names, do something later, or catalog everything we encounter. But what I discovered over and over again is that everyone over 50, 60, 70 thinks that any kind of forgetfulness means they have Alzheimer's. They told me things like, "Well, I al

ways

forget names. And if I don't write down what I have to do next, I won't remember to do it. And I'm al

ways

walking into the kitchen and I don't know why I'm there." So These people feel panic, fear, stress and a lot of shame due to these moments of forgetfulness, which are actually totally normal.

My name is Lisa Génova. I am an author and neuroscientist. The name of my book is 'Remember: The Science of Memory. the art of forgetting.' I've been talking about Alzheimer's using 'Still Alice' as a vehicle for that conversation for over a decade, trying to help people understand what it's like to have Alzheimer's and recognize what those symptoms of Alzheimer's are. dementia. Alzheimer's starts with a protein called "amyloid beta." It's a sticky protein that will bind to itself and form "amyloid plaques." And if enough amyloid plaques

build

up in the

brain

, at some point it reaches a point. inflection that causes neurofibrillary tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death and all the symptoms that we classically know as Alzheimer's.

Before that turning point, you have no symptoms. It's like having high cholesterol doesn't mean you're going to have a heart attack. So, below the tipping point, all symptoms of forgetfulness are normal. "Why did I enter this room?" "Where did I park my car?" "Oh, what's his name?" "I need to remember to buy something later; I forgot." That's totally normal. After the turning point, failures in memory formation and retrieval are different. Alzheimer's begins in the hippocampus, the same place in the brain responsible for forming new memories. So, the first symptoms of Alzheimer's will be not remembering what someone said a few minutes ago, repeating yourself over and over again, because you don't remember what you just said, not remembering what happened last week even if it was really emotional, meaningful, new , surprising or repeated.

Things you would normally remember from last week won't be consolidated because your hippocampus is under attack. Alzheimer's will move, it will not stay just in the hippocampus. It invades your frontal lobe, so you will have trouble solving problems and making decisions. It invades parts of your brain that have to do with where things are in space, so you might get lost in the neighborhood you've lived in your entire life. It will invade the parts of your brain that deal with language, so you will start to have more and more trouble finding words. The disease will move into your limbic system and cause changes in emotions and personality.

So what's the good news here? There is actually a lot of that. The vast majority of what we forget every day is totally normal and probably will be throughout our lives. For the vast majority of us, Alzheimer's is not the destiny of our brain. Only 2% of people suffer from Alzheimer's, which is 100% hereditary. This

build

up of amyloid plaques takes between 15 and 20 years and can be influenced by the way we live. So what are the things that influence those amyloid plaque levels? Sleep. While you sleep, there are cells in your brain called "glial cells." These are the janitors of your brain.

It is the sewer and sanitation department. They get very busy cleaning out all the metabolic waste that built up in your brain while you were awake. And one of the things that it critically removes is amyloid beta. So if you don't get enough sleep, your glial cells won't have enough time to do their job and you'll wake up in the morning with some extra amyloid in your brain that hasn't been cleared away. If this happens over decades, 15 to 20 years of amyloid plaque buildup, you are increasing your risk of developing Alzheimer's. Diet. There have been a lot of really good studies that have shown that following a "Mediterranean" or "MIND" diet can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's by a third to a half.

This means eating the rainbow: leafy green vegetables, brightly colored fruits and berries, fatty fish, nuts, beans, and olive oil. That's the food that will support your brain health and help prevent Alzheimer's. Exercise. It works to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. A brisk walk for 30 minutes, four to five times a week, is enough to lower amyloid plaque levels and reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's by a third to a half. Again, this is significant. If I offered you a pill that would reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by 50%, you would take it. So we want to get up and move.

Chronic stress is really bad for our memory, both today by creating new memories and because it will increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's in the future. With chronic stress, your cortisol levels remain elevated. You are in a constant state of fight or flight. This is really bad for your hippocampus. In fact, it will reduce the size of your hippocampus by inhibiting "neurogenesis": it will inhibit the birth of new neurons there. You now have a smaller structure that is essential for forming new memories and is the first place affected by Alzheimer's. That's why we want to do things that control stress.

Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, exercise and being with people. All of these have been shown to restore your cortisol levels and will restore the size of your hippocampus. Learning new things. Let's say you haven't done any of those things I just mentioned. Let's say you're chronically sleep deprived, you watch Netflix until 3:00 a.m., you've been raising children for decades, you're a woman, you've gone through menopause. I don't need to list all that. Let's say your amyloid plaque levels have reached that critical point and the cascade that causes Alzheimer's has been triggered. If you've lived a life where you're cognitively active, you learn new things regularly - you're building what we call a "cognitive reserve." Every time you learn something new, you build new synapses, you build new neural connections.

So what does this have to do with Alzheimer's? If I have any Alzheimer's disease pathology present in my brain, the amyloid plaques are destroying the connections between a certain number of neurons, blocking some synapses. But what if I have created many redundant connections? I have abundance and redundancy in connections. I can dance around those obstacles. I can take detours and still get to the memory I'm trying to get to. So learning new things gives us a way to develop an Alzheimer's-

resistant

brain. The good news is that many of these lifestyle factors work as well as any pill we can develop to prevent Alzheimer's.

We just have to do them. Forgetfulness due to Alzheimer's is scary. But normal forgetting, the things we forget every day, shouldn't be like that.