Dr. Paddy Barrett

The link is fundamentally, if you get heart disease right, you get most of the factors right for preventing dementia.

So when we talk about dementia, we have to break it down into two categories.

There's lots of different types of dementia, but the broad ones are vascular dementia.

That's lots of multiple small strokes or Alzheimer's dementia.

And when you look at the pathology here, there's often a significant overlap.

And the big challenge is, is that dementia is obviously a very big concern for a lot of people.

It often exceeds their concern for things like heart disease or sometimes even cancer because of what it actually involves in terms of what it takes away for people.

So it becomes a big priority.

The treatments that we have for dementia are getting better, but they're just not as good as we would have hoped.

So therefore, the emphasis on preventing dementia or pushing it out much later in life has to be a priority.

We know that getting the fundamental risk factors right, like smoking cessation, blood pressure control, getting weight right, avoiding diabetes, significantly reduces the likelihood of future dementia.

So this is where I come at it insofar as a cardiologist, is that if we get heart disease right, if we get all the core fundamentals of heart disease right, not only do we reduce our risk of dying from heart disease, we significantly reduce the future risk of dementia.

not widely known no I would imagine people are surprised when you say that to them

Yes, it is a surprising factor.

But if you actually look at the literature, it's been described routinely for quite some time.

One of the most important papers that came out here was in 2024, I believe, that showed that nearly half of all cases of dementia are potentially avoidable because of modifying very core factors.

And the other factor that most people will be surprised by is that if you look at, say, someone in their early 80s, in the 1980s,

there's about a 30% chance that that person would have had dementia.

If you look at that figure now, it's about 10%.

So that is a two-thirds reduction in that specific age category over 40 years.