Health

Mellowing Out May Decrease Dementia

by Karenke4 | January 20, 2009 at 01:00 pm

157 views | 4 Recommendations | 4 comments

New research from the UK suggests that personal disposition may affect your tendencies for dementia. Scientists in the UK talked with 500 elderly people, analyzing their lifestyles, activity levels, and social dispositions.

They found that the people who were mellow, worried less and were more active, had up to a 50% lower rate of dementia than their more neurotic peers.

Research published in the journal Neurology asked 500 healthy elderly people to fill out questionnaires about their personalities.

Those who were calm and relaxed had a 50% lower risk of developing dementia during the six years of the study.

Dementia causes lapses in memory and hinders the ability to reason. And while it is an increasingly present problem in our aging societies, research and understanding of the disease has not grown proportionately.

This new research is good news as it does provide a link between lifestyle choices and dementia. While dementia is largely believed to be linked to genetics, certain factors may affect your likelihood to push off the disease, or escape it altogether.

Dr Hui-Xin Wang of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who led the research, said: "In the past, studies have shown that chronic distress can affect parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, possibly leading to dementia.

"But our findings suggest that having a calm and outgoing personality in combination with a socially active lifestyle may decrease the risk of developing dementia even further.

"The good news is, lifestyle factors can be modified as opposed to genetic factors which cannot be controlled.

If you are stressed, worried or neurotic perhaps now is a good time to enroll in that yoga class you've been avoiding, or head on the meditation retreat you've always dreamed of. Making efforts to decrease the amount of stress now may just help you in the future.

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Paschen

at 14:03 on January 20th, 2009

I am not sure about this. Have they done any DNA and gene research along with this. What is there definitions of mellow and stress? Has this been concluded by another independent research as well?

alainboucheret

at 14:04 on January 20th, 2009

alainboucheret has contributed a photo to this story.

Fripouille

at 14:17 on January 20th, 2009

Do people get paid for telling us that chilling out stops us going nuts?!! And that being neurotic isn't good for us?!!!

Gimme a job!!!!!

This is no way intended to be a comment on your reasons for putting this up Karenke4, and I don't know how old you are, but no-one sane of 55 years old, as I am, needs to be taught that lol!!

Have a good evening.....