Alzheimer’s Disease: New Survey and Research Study on Awareness, Testing and Prevention

Very inter­est­ing new data rein­forc­ing two main themes we have been ana­lyz­ing for a while:
1) We bet­ter start pay­ing seri­ous atten­tion (and R&D dol­lars) to lifestyle-based and non-inva­sive cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al health inter­ven­tions, which are most­ly ignored in favor of inva­sive, drug-based options
2) Inter­ven­tions will need to be per­son­al­ized. The study below ana­lyzes data at the coun­try lev­el, but the same log­ic applies to the indi­vid­ual level

Many fear Alzheimer’s, want to be test­ed: sur­vey (Reuters):

- “The tele­phone sur­vey of 2,678 adults aged 18 and old­er in the Unit­ed States, France, Ger­many, Spain and Poland was con­duct­ed by researchers at the Har­vard School of Pub­lic Health and Alzheimer Europe, with fund­ing by Bay­er AG”

- “When asked to iden­ti­fy the most feared dis­ease out of a list of sev­en that includ­ed can­cer, heart dis­ease and stroke, near­ly a quar­ter of respon­dents from four of the five coun­tries said they most fear get­ting Alzheimer’s.”

- “Despite high lev­els of anx­i­ety in the study, as many as 40 per­cent of peo­ple said they did not know Alzheimer’s is fatal and many said they thought there were effec­tive treat­ments that could slow its progression.”

- “Cur­rent drugs only treat Alzheimer’s symp­toms, but none have been shown to delay the advance of the disease”

Mod­i­fy­ing Risk Fac­tors May Pre­vent Alzheimer’s Epi­dem­ic (Med­scape):

- “Up to half of all Alzheimer’s cas­es may be attrib­ut­able to these mod­i­fi­able risk fac­tors and sug­gests that pub­lic health inter­ven­tions to increase edu­ca­tion and phys­i­cal activ­i­ty and reduce smok­ing rates and depres­sion could poten­tial­ly have a dra­mat­ic impact on Alzheimer’s preva­lence over time,” study inves­ti­ga­tor Deb­o­rah Barnes, PhD, MPH, …”

- “This gives us hope about things that we might be able to do now to try to pre­vent the epi­dem­ic that we see com­ing our way,” she added.

- “At 19% the risk fac­tor that con­tributed most to AD world­wide was low edu­ca­tion­al lev­el, which was defined as no edu­ca­tion beyond grade school. Dr. Barnes said the inves­ti­ga­tors were sur­prised that low edu­ca­tion­al lev­el topped the world­wide list but attrib­uted it to the fact that lack of edu­ca­tion is so com­mon. She not­ed that 40% of peo­ple world­wide have no edu­ca­tion beyond a very basic lev­el. The sec­ond high­est num­ber of cas­es world­wide was attrib­uted to smok­ing (14%) fol­lowed by phys­i­cal inac­tiv­i­ty (13%), depres­sion (11%), midlife hyper­ten­sion (5%), midlife obe­si­ty (2%), and dia­betes (2%).”

- “In the Unit­ed States phys­i­cal inac­tiv­i­ty emerged as the main dri­ver of AD preva­lence, account­ing for 21% of cas­es. This was fol­lowed by depres­sion (15%), smok­ing (11%), midlife hyper­ten­sion (8%), midlife obe­si­ty (7%), low edu­ca­tion­al lev­el (7%), and dia­betes (3%).”