How to PREVENT Dementia???

Nobody is blaming anyone for their lifestyle. merely pointing out that there is a lot of evidence for a causal relationship between a healthy lifestyle and longer life and better health.

Remember what the statistics say is that you are more likely to have a longer and healthier life not that you will. A proportion of those leading a blameless life will get dementia, cancer and all those other ills and die young.

To point out that there is causal relationship between certain eating/drinking/exercise habits and a shorter life and more illness is not to blame anyone, it is merely to point out an incontrovertible fact.

If I go out in the rain to bring the washing in I will get wet.If as a result I then get pneumonia and die, I am not to blame for my death, but there is a causal relationship between getting wet and my death.

I do hate this continual waving around of the blame word in situations where one is dealing with facts and statistics, not emotions. It is usually used by people who realise that they are defending the indefensible and use it as their last card because, of course, we must never ever argue with anyone who might get upset.

By the way the above paragraph is not a slight at any individual member of Gransnet on this thread or any other, just a cynical conclusion I have reached over many years seeing this card being played.

Nobody would ever 'blame' someone for getting dementia. Certain factors, such as increased age and genetics, are obviously very important. But, if research is to be believed, then we can possibly minimalise our risks wth knowledge which wasn't available to our own parents and grandparents.

One example; there is a known link between type 2 diabetes and vascular dementia. Type 2 is largely (but not wholly) preventable so by taking current lifestyle advice we can reduce our risk or type 2 and therefore our risk of vascular dementia.

Hello morethan2, there is a genetic component to some dementias but it is usually in the rarer forms of dementia. There are more than 100 different types of dementia. If you look at alzheimers.org.uk there is a lot of information.